Modern living tends to mean spending a lot of time looking at electronic displays, and the wear and tear on our eyeballs can add up. On top of taking screen breaks and dimming displays at night, there’s another step you can take to protect your peepers: Make the text on your devices large enough to read comfortably.
There are several reasons why you might be squinting at screens—maybe you’re not as young anymore, or maybe your office is never adequately lit—but there’s no reason to put up with it. Every mobile and desktop platform includes options for enlarging the size of text and menus, and they’re usually not difficult to find.
Android
Let’s start with Android. On Google Pixel phones, you can adjust text size by opening Settings and tapping Display and touch > Display size and text. There are two sliders, for text and other on-screen elements, as well as a toggle switch for bold text. At the bottom, you’ll find a button to Reset settings.
Samsung Galaxy phones work in a similar way. Open up Settings, then tap Display > Font size and style. There’s a simple slider down at the bottom of the screen that lets you make on-screen text smaller or larger, as well as a toggle switch for making text bold.
You can add a font size tile to the Quick Settings panel, but this is only available on Pixel phones, not Galaxy phones. Drag down from the top of the screen with two fingers, then tap the pen icon to find Font size and add it to the visible tiles.
iOS
If you’re using an iPhone, you can find the text size settings by heading to Settings and then choosing Display & Brightness and then Text Size. You then get a simple slider you can adjust to change how big the text is in most places across all of your apps. Underneath Text Size there’s a Bold Text toggle switch you can use too.
You can make iOS text even larger by choosing Accessibility from Settings, then tapping on Display & Text Size > Larger Text. If you enable the Larger Accessibility Sizes toggle switch, you’ll find the scope of the text size slider increases, so you can stretch the size of characters on screen even further.
It’s possible to add a text size shortcut to the Control Center for quick access, if you find it helpful. Swipe down from the top right of the screen to get to the Control Center, then tap the + (plus) button in the top left corner and Add a Control. The Text Size slider is under Display & Brightness and has an AA label on it.
Windows
On Windows computers, you can adjust the size of text by clicking Settings from the Start menu, then selecting Accessibility > Text size. You get a straightforward slider here you can move around to adjust text size, with a preview—tap Apply to apply the changes.
Windows also offers some useful scaling settings, which essentially allow you to zoom in on the entire interface, without sacrificing too much quality—so text and other elements should still appear sharp on screen.
To get at these settings, pick System > Display, then use the Scale drop-down menu to change the zoom level. You can also change the values in the Display resolution drop-down to make pixels larger, but it’s not quite as elegant a solution.
macOS
To change the size of text and menus on a Mac, click the Apple button (top left), then System Settings. Under Accessibility click Text size, and you get a slider at the top: Drag this to the left or right to change the size of system text (there’s a Default marker on the slider if you want to go back to the original setting).
Next to Menu bar size, you can choose between Default and Large, and the latter option makes the text on the macOS menu bar just that little bit larger. There are several other settings on the same screen that can help text legibility, including toggle switches for increasing contrast and reducing transparency.
There’s one more option you can check out, which is under Appearance in System Settings: It’s a Sidebar icon size drop-down menu, and if you change it to Large, then sidebar icons and their associated text labels will be bigger than normal in menus across all of your macOS apps.
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