Low vision on Mac: get text out of images to read it

Your Mac has excellent tools for low vision: it can magnify the screen, enlarge the text under the pointer, restyle a page and read it aloud. They share one weakness. They work on real text, and a lot of what you need to read isn’t real text. A scanned letter, a screenshot someone sent you, a poster on a web page or a slide in a video call is a picture of words. Here’s how to turn those pictures into text your Mac can enlarge or speak.

Built-in vision tools on Mac, at a glance

All of these are in Apple menu → System Settings → Accessibility. If you haven’t set them up yet, start here; the linked guides go step by step.

Hover Text on Mac covers Hover Text and Zoom in detail, and making text bigger covers text size across apps.

When the text is an image

You can usually tell quickly. You can’t select a single word, Hover Text doesn’t show the words, VoiceOver says “image”, and Accessibility Reader tells you it found no text.

Zoom still works, but it magnifies pixels. Small text in a compressed image gets blurrier the more you zoom, and you have to pan along every line. Two built-in features help in specific cases:

• VoiceOver image descriptions. With the VoiceOver cursor on an image, press VO-Shift-L to hear a description. VoiceOver Utility’s VoiceOver Recognition category has an On-Device Mode to keep that processing on your Mac, though Apple notes descriptions may be less detailed. A description is a summary of the picture, not a word-by-word reading.
• Magnifier for Mac. New in macOS Tahoe, it uses a connected camera or an iPhone to magnify things in the room, like a whiteboard or a printed page, and works with Accessibility Reader. It’s for paper, not for images already on your screen.

For text on your screen, the dependable route is to copy the words out.

Copy, then enlarge or listen

For an image file, such as a photo or a saved screenshot, Live Text does the copying:

1. Open the image in Preview.
2. Drag across the words; the pointer becomes a text cursor over text it recognizes.
3. Press ⌘C.
4. Open TextEdit, create a new document and press ⌘V.
5. Make it readable: choose Format → Font → Show Fonts and pick a large size, or press ⌘Esc to open the text in Accessibility Reader with your own theme, font and spacing.
6. To listen, select the text and press ⌥Esc, or press Play in Accessibility Reader.

For text that isn’t a file, like a slide in a video call or a picture inside an app, press ⌃⇧⌘4 and drag over it to copy a screenshot. Then choose File → New from Clipboard in Preview and continue from step 2. It works, but it’s a lot of small targets for tired eyes.

In Unpixel

Unpixel shortens the route to one shortcut. Press ⇧⌘2, drag a rectangle around the words anywhere on screen, and let go; the text is on your clipboard. Paste it into your reading pad and carry on from step 5. It doesn’t speak or enlarge the text itself; macOS does that part well already.

Details that matter if you have low vision:

• Confirmation by sound. Turn on Play sound in Settings → General if the small “Copied” message is hard to see. The message itself can be turned off.
• Joined lines. With Keep line breaks off in Settings → Recognition, the lines of a paragraph are joined. Pasted text then reflows at a large size instead of keeping the picture’s short lines.
• VoiceOver labels on the panel’s icon buttons, and a table’s size is read out as “5 rows by 3 columns”.
• Reduce Motion is respected: the menu bar icon dims steadily instead of pulsing while a longer job, such as a multi-page PDF, is being read.
• Small print reads better large. Zoom into the image or the page with ⌘+ before you capture.

Keyboard-first capture

Both the screenshot crosshair and Unpixel start from the keyboard, but choosing the area is a drag. Unpixel has no keyboard-only way to pick the region. If dragging is difficult, these help:

• Mouse Keys. Turn it on in System Settings → Accessibility → Pointer Control. Move the pointer with 7, 8, 9, U, O, J, K and L, press M to hold the button down, move to the far corner, and press the period key to let go. Apple lists the numeric-keypad keys too.
• A bigger pointer. In Accessibility → Display, raise Pointer size so the crosshair is easy to follow.
• Zoom in first. Selecting a large target on a zoomed screen is easier than a tiny one at normal size.
• Cancel freely. Esc cancels a capture without changing your clipboard.

Setting it up once

1. In Accessibility → Read & Speak, turn on Speak selection and Accessibility Reader.
2. Open Accessibility Reader once and choose a theme, font, size and spacing you’re comfortable with.
3. Turn on Hover Text and Zoom if you use them, and check the pointer size.
4. Set TextEdit’s default font size and keep it in the Dock.
5. Pick your capture route: Live Text for image files, a screenshot or a capture tool for everything else.