May 15, 2025

Hands-On Apple 182: Magnifier Walkthrough

21 minutes

Discover the incredible power of Apple's Magnifier accessibility tool as Mikah Sargent provides a comprehensive walkthrough of this feature that's about to make its way to macOS. Far more than just a simple magnification tool, Magnifier offers a suite of detection capabilities that can help anyone better interact with their surroundings.

Activities feature - Mikah demonstrates how to create and save custom "Activities" that configure Magnifier for specific use cases with different controls and detection settings.

Detection capabilities - The detect feature can identify and describe scenes, people, furniture, doors, text, and even what you're pointing at with impressive accuracy.

Capture functionality - Users can take photos of text or objects to zoom in on them later or have the content read aloud through the reader option.

Customizable filters - Various color filters including black and white, red on black, yellow on black, and others help users with colorblindness or those who need specific contrast settings.

Advanced settings options - Mikah details the extensive settings that allow users to customize primary and secondary controls, detection preferences, and feedback methods.

Door detection features - The tool can outline doors and provide detailed information about their color, material, shape, handle position, and even whether they should be pushed or pulled.

People and furniture detection - Magnifier can detect people at various distances with changing audio cues as they get closer, and can identify furniture including whether it's occupied.

Point and speak functionality - Users can point at objects to have Magnifier identify and read text from that specific location.

Detect text around you and have it read out loud using Magnifier on iPhone - Apple Support - https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/detect-text-read-loud-iph29dbe3fb6/ios

Host: Mikah Sargent

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