The trap: your zoom is invisible to viewers
Almost everyone starts by turning on System Settings → Accessibility → Zoom and magnifying with ⌃ + scroll. Your screen gets bigger. It feels solved.
It is not. Your viewers still see the screen at normal scale. Screen sharing captures the composited desktop image, and accessibility Zoom is applied after that, as a transform on the way to your physical display. The call app never receives a magnified image, so it cannot send one.
This fails silently and in the worst direction. On your side it looks like it is working perfectly. Nobody on the call will interrupt to tell you they cannot read it, so you find out afterwards, or never. If you want the full technical explanation, it is in why Mac zoom does not show in screen recordings – same cause, same pipeline.
Everything below is what does work.
Share the window, not the whole desktop
The cheapest improvement, and most people skip it. When you share your entire screen, the call app shrinks your whole desktop into a viewer's window – which on a 27-inch display means your 13px UI arrives as roughly 6px on someone's laptop. When you share a single window, that window is scaled to fill their view instead.
On a large or multi-display Mac this alone is often the difference between unreadable and fine. It also stops you from accidentally sharing your notifications, your other tabs and whatever is in your Dock.
- Zoom: Share Screen → the Basic tab → pick the app window rather than Desktop.
- Google Meet: Present now → A window.
- Microsoft Teams: Share → choose the window under Window rather than Screen.
The trade-off is real: dialogs and menus that open outside the shared window will not appear for viewers, and switching apps means re-picking the share. For a single-app walkthrough it is still the right default.
Enlarge the content, not the display
Anything the app itself redraws larger ends up in the shared stream, because it is genuinely part of the desktop image:
- Browsers: ⌘+. Two or three presses is usually the sweet spot for a call.
- Editors and IDEs: raise the editor font size, or use a presentation mode. VS Code, Xcode and JetBrains IDEs all have one.
- Terminal: ⌘+, or a dedicated large-font profile you switch to for calls.
- Figma, Sketch, design tools: their own zoom is real zoom and shares perfectly.
- Keynote and PowerPoint: presenter mode, and do not put 11pt text on a slide.
Where this runs out: it cannot magnify the menu bar, System Settings, the Dock, a file dialog, a notification, or any app without a zoom control. And it reflows layouts instead of magnifying them, so a zoomed browser is a different layout, not a closer look at the same one.
Set up your display before the call
For a scheduled demo or class, spend a minute before you join: System Settings → Displays, pick a scaled resolution with larger text. Everything you share is drawn bigger for the whole session, and it costs nothing.
If you present often and have a second display, a good pattern is to keep the shared display at a lower scaled resolution permanently and keep your notes, chat and controls on the other one. You stop fiddling with settings ten seconds before you go live.
The limit is the same as before: it is a whole-session decision. You cannot use it to push in on one checkbox because someone asked a question.
Pushing in live, mid-sentence
This is the case none of the above covers: you are talking, someone asks "which button?", and you want to zoom in on that button right now, for everyone, without stopping the share or changing settings.
For viewers to see it, the magnification has to exist in the image the call app captures. That means one of two approaches:
A floating magnifier window
Some Mac apps display a separate window holding a magnified copy of a region. It is a real window, so it is composited into the desktop and it does transmit. The catch is that it is a picture: you cannot click, select or type inside it, so you end up pointing at the small original while your audience watches the large copy, and your cursor is in the wrong place on their screen.
A magnifier that renders into the frame
The other approach magnifies at the same layer your windows live on, so the captured image is already zoomed. Viewers see exactly your view, and because the underlying screen is still live rather than a snapshot, clicking and typing keep working while you are zoomed in.
That is what Gaze does: scroll, pinch or a hotkey glides the zoom to your cursor, it appears in Zoom, Meet, Teams, OBS and any recorder, and your clicks land on the real buttons. There is a feature-by-feature comparison with the built-in macOS zoom if you want to see exactly where the system stops.
Zoom, Google Meet and Teams, specifically
Zoom
Viewers can zoom into your stream themselves with View Options → Zoom Ratio – worth telling people once, it solves a lot of "can you make that bigger" moments. Zoom also has annotation over a shared screen for both presenter and participants. What Zoom does not have is a presenter-side control that magnifies the shared image for everyone.
Turn on Optimize for video clip only for actual video. It softens fine text, which is the opposite of what you want for a UI walkthrough.
Google Meet
Viewers can pin the presentation and open it full screen, which helps. Meet gives the presenter no magnification control, so everything comes down to how large your content is at the source.
If people join from phones, assume nothing smaller than a heading is readable. Meet's mobile layout shrinks a shared desktop brutally.
Microsoft Teams
Teams has presenter modes and window sharing, and viewers can zoom the shared content on their side. Again, the presenter cannot magnify the outgoing image from inside the app.
The pattern across all three: viewer-side zoom exists, presenter-side zoom does not. Which means the fix has to happen on your Mac, before the call app captures the screen.
A two-minute pre-call checklist
- Decide window share or full screen, and set it up before you join.
- Raise the font size in whatever you are demoing, now rather than live.
- Turn on Do Not Disturb. A notification during a share is worse than small text.
- Record five seconds of your own screen and watch it back. That is exactly what viewers will get.
- If you need live push-ins, have the tool for it open and its hotkey in your fingers before the call, not during.
Point 4 is the one to keep. It takes thirty seconds and it is the only way to see your share the way your audience sees it.