MacOS Big Sir Beta: My Favorite Feature So Far

This one is for all you accessibility nerds. I know I not the only one. :)

Last year, Apple introduced a couple of interesting, if not groundbreaking accessibility features to MacOS. Unfortunately, like a lot of accessibility features when first released, they proved to be unstable. Follow Focus was my favorite feature last year. When activated, It placed any text you were writing or reading in a box on the screen. Within that box, you could make the text any size and color you wanted. There is a lot more to it. But you get the idea.

The bad news is that feature was half-baked on release, and is still not fully baked after all this time. It is transformative when it works. I use the feature all the time. But it comes with a lot of frustration because there are times when it just stops working for no good reason. I am elated that it is there and frustrated by Apple’s inability to fix it.

The other potentially groundbreaking accessibility feature from last year is Zoom Display. That is not the official name for the feature. It doesn’t really have an official name. You can find the feature under the path, Settings, Accessibility, Zoom, Choose Display. The key is that you have to have a second display connected to your Mac. In my case, I am using an iPad connected via AirPlay Display. That is another article altogether. Just know that if you have an iPad lying about, you can likely use it as a second display.

Once you click all the right buttons (this is not a tutorial), the end result is that when you activate the Zoom command, the zoom shows up on the second monitor, leaving your primary monitor undisturbed. Note that this feature never worked before now. It always crashed. So I never got a chance to try it out until now. Under Big Sur and iPadOS 14, it works well.

This is an important feature for people with low vision because it allows them to zoom in as much as necessary while maintaining a full view of the screen. The secondary screen is the mirror of the main screen. When Zoom is activated, everything on the secondary screen is enlarged. That means it can show a much smaller portion of the actual screen. This is useful for things like filling out forms and even writing a lot of text. Your main screen maintains the context of everything on display, while the smaller screen is zoomed in on the details you need.

Just for the fun of it, I switched things around and set the iPad as the primary screen and used my 32” monitor as the secondary display where all the zooming happens. That also worked perfectly. If you have a laptop, you can connect a big screen to it and use it as a Zoom display. That will be very useful for a lot of people. It is a little hard to explain. so I might do a video demonstration of the feature. Once you see it in action, you will believe in magic.

David Johnson