All things mac and macOS

Oh yeah, and I just realized I've been a dum idjit and completely forgotten to mention the slightly hacky way you can enlarge some UI fonts that might help y'all @[email protected] & @[email protected].

You may be familiar with this already, but by editing some system preference keys "manually", you can crank up the default font sizes that apps, the OS, and some native UI elements use beyond what System Settings lets you do – both allowing for bigger font sizes in apps and the OS itself (but which can lead to UI bugs), and allowing changing eg. label or tooltip font sizes separately. This can only work for native apps, but even then sometimes it only sort of works at best and especially SwiftUI seems to just completely ignore these (because of course it fucking does).

You can either use Tinkertool which also allows you to export and import the current state of all the configs that Tinkertool manages, and that's pretty handy when you're fiddling with your configs. It does eg. limit the system font size to max 24 for whatever reason though, so if you want to go over that limit you can hop in the Terminal and use defaults to add/change the preferences:

(All of these take an int value)

• NSFixedPitchFontSize
• NSSystemFontSize
• NSMessageFontSize
• NSLabelFontSize
• NSToolTipsFontSize
• NSTitleBarFontSize
• NSPaletteFontSize

So for example to set the system font size to 15, you'd use defaults write -g NSSystemFontSize -int 15
If you want to restore the default value I think it's enough to just delete the key(s) you've changed: eg. defaults delete -g NSSystemFontSize.

Caveat emptor, though: this is of course completely unsupported and you'll probably run into UI funk depending on which sizes you change and by how much. For example NSLabelFontSize defaults to 10, and I've increased it to 12 which mostly works but some labels can get truncated if the label's container doesn't scale with the label font size which many apps assume will never change. It's definitely not an ideal solution or even a good one by any means because UIs do kinda start borking once you change these too much, but might be worth a shot anyhow?

Does anyone understand the reasoning behind this trend, and is there any possible fix for end users other than begging application developers to have pity? :)

The reasoning is that too many developers and execs don't give a flying fuck about accessibility features, and many will even outright balk at the suggestion of using time and money to develop them at the cost of "paying" features, and many developers don't even know how to write accessible UIs. When I was a CTO I had the CEO berate me for wanting to pay more attention to accessibility; it would have cost money and since none of our customers actually requested accessibility features it would have been useless, according to them. Our incompetent fuck of a frontend dev also didn't know the first thing about accessibility, and thought that learning about it would have been a waste of their time.

I'm somewhat visually impaired too, and on macOS I've just started using the "hover text" feature that you can find under "Zoom" in the accessibility settings, where if you hold down the option key you'll see a popup that shows a text description of whatever UI element you're pointing at (or eg. a description if it's an icon button). Unfortunately it doesn't work with all apps and all UI elements because, again, devs would need to put in some work too. In many cases I'll just have to use the zoom feature to make sense of some smaller UI items.

I'm not sure there's much to be done except to beg for pity, and based on my previous experience both using and producing apps, the likelihood of success is pretty slim. Always worth it to ask devs for accessibility features, but don't get your hopes up.