I’ve been regularly tweeting about the things I like, love, dislike and abhor about my new MacBook Pro and Apple in general. Several people have said, “More details, please!” which has inspired me to write this series of blog posts about switching from a PC to a Mac.

Today’s installment is entitled “ToolBar and Help Menu Font Size: A #fail for both machines, but zooming tools give Apple the MacVantage”

Click on the image below to see a full-sized rendering of a Pages document, including the toolbar. (Pages is Apple’s word-processing program.) What do you notice about the image – letter AND toolbar – as a whole?

You probably noticed that while I have made the text and photo in the document relatively large, the fonts and icons on the toolbar are seriously tiny. You may be saying, “I think she made a mistake when she captured that image. That can’t be realistic.” Sadly, I did not make a mistake. The toolbars on the Mac’s native programs, as well as many programs written for the Mac, are truly that hard to see. In fact, the image might look better in your browser than it does in real life, depending on your browser’s zoom settings.

If you search the web — especially Apple forums — for the subject of dimunitive fonts on the toolbars, you will find that this is a major frustration for many users.

Not that PCs are much better, mind you. In fact, if miniscule fonts are a problem for you, I recommend you go with a Mac over a PC. Why, you ask, when PCs have a slightly better toolbar-to-program-content ratio? The answer is:

Mac has tools that make viewing the screen easier

The image below is a full-sized screenshot of two programs that are open on my desktop. The front image is the same Pages program that you saw in the first screenshot. The back image is the toolbar and navigation pane for an Adobe program. Click to see the image at full size. Do you notice a difference between the Pages program in this screenshot and the one in the first screenshot?

For the second screenshot, I used the truly awesome Mac zoom feature to instantly bring the toolbar closer to me with a stroke of my fingers on the trackpad. You can use this zoom feature with a mouse, too. The fonts and icons on the toolbar look much larger and easier to decipher, don’t they? Now look at the toolbar and navigation pane for the Adobe program in the background. That program has eeny-weeny toolbar fonts, too, but by using the zoom feature, I can make any area of the screen legible.

When I got my Mac, I imagined using this great zoom-on-an-area feature to thwart bad web design, the kind that is not particularly helped by using the zoom tool of a browser. I didn’t realize that I would have to use it to navigate Apple’s own programs!

Here’s are two more Mac tools to help you see what you are doing:

Finder Customization Settings

The screenshot above is of the Finder window. (Click to see it full-sized.) Finder is equivalent to Microsoft’s Windows Explorer. You will notice that the navigation bar on the left features atomic-level type. However, the actual Finder window contents are large. This is because you can choose your own font size, up to 16px.

Help Menu Customization Settings

The screenshot above is of the Pages help menu. Again, the toolbar font is infinitismal, but the instructions are gigantic. I deliberately made them that way for this illustration; there are several steps between blindstitch and billboard.

A few random notes

The letter template. I know people are going to ask me about it. It’s one of the templates that comes with Pages.

Adobe Bridge. That’s the program behind Pages in the second screenshot. It comes with any of the CS5 products, and it’s superior to Finder when it comes to navigating around your computer, especially if you want to instantly know everything possible about your images.

Do you have any Mac visual-accessibility tips you’d like to share? Please leave a comment!

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