Apple continues to improve the accessibility features available for all of its devices, and the Mac is no exception. macOS Sonoma ships with a few accessibility features that launched earlier in iOS and iPadOS, but never on the Mac. This version of macOS comes with unique and useful features, such as the ability to create and store your own voice—invaluable to people who are at risk of losing their voice. Let’s take a look at the best new accessibility features on the Mac.
Easily set up custom font sizes for Apple’s apps
macOS Sonoma has a new accessibility feature which lets you force apps to use a larger or smaller size depending on your preferences. You can check this out by going to System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Text Size. This page allows you to set a default text size for all apps and lets you customize preferred sizes for some Apple apps. You can also adjust the font size in any app by pressing Command + or Command –.
Create your own voice
If you’re at risk of losing your voice entirely, you can now use your Mac to create a voice that sounds like you. Apple allows you to use this voice with the Live Speech accessibility feature on phone and FaceTime calls that you answer on your Mac. Go to System Settings > Accessibility > Personal Voice to set this up. You can check out our guide for this feature on iPhone to see how it works.
Use your voice on calls
To use the voice you’ve created with the Personal Voice feature, you should enable the Live Speech feature too. You can go to System Settings > Accessibility > Live Speech and enable Live Speech. This will allow you to type out your replies and your Mac will convert it to speech in your voice.
More natural sounding voices for VoiceOver
VoiceOver is essential for people who live with low vision. With VoiceOver enabled, your Mac will read out descriptions for all items on the screen and allow you to use the computer much better if you can’t see the screen clearly. In macOS Sonoma, the Siri voices that are used with VoiceOver sound far more natural particularly at high rates of speech.
Customize Siri voices for VoiceOver and Spoken Content
For VoiceOver and Spoken Content—a new macOS feature that lets you ask Siri to read articles out loud—you can set up AI voices to your liking. macOS Sonoma allows you to tweak the pitch range. You can adjust these for Spoken Content by going to System Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content. Similarly for VoiceOver, you can go to System Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver and click Open VoiceOver Utility. Go to the Speech tab and hit Edit to make the changes you need.
On a related note, Apple also claims that navigating your code in Xcode is now a much smoother experience with Voice Control.
Enhanced Voice Control features
Controlling your Mac with your voice is becoming easier with Sonoma. When you fire up Voice Control, your Mac will give you tutorials to learn how to make the most of this feature. You’ll also notice that text editing with Voice Control is more accurate as you can use phonetic corrections to pick the correct word from a list of similar-sounding words.
Animated images are paused automatically
Some people find it hard to look at continuously looping GIFs and macOS Sonoma has a solution for that problem. Animated images will no longer loop forever in Messages and Safari. They pause automatically and you can click these images to keep viewing their animation.
Set a custom zoom level for each monitor
For those who use multiple monitors, macOS Sonoma has a new feature that allows you to set up a custom zoom level for each monitor. This will allow you to make text easier to read on the monitor you use for reading, without affecting the UI elements on other monitors.
Switch Control lets you create a virtual game controller
Gaming is pretty difficult for people who have motor control challenges. You can use the Switch Control feature in macOS Sonoma to turn your facial expressions or other actions into controls on a virtual game controller. You can configure this by going to System Settings > Accessibility > Switch Control.
