Gaze for low vision

Start with what macOS already gives you

Before spending anything, set these up. They are free, they are on your Mac right now, and for a lot of people they are the whole answer.

• Accessibility Zoom. System Settings → Accessibility → Zoom. Turn on Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom and you get smooth magnification centred on your pointer. Full screen, a picture-in-picture lens, or a split view.
• The Advanced panel inside Zoom. This is where it gets good and almost nobody opens it. You can change how the screen image moves – continuously with the pointer, or only when you reach an edge, which is far calmer for reading. You can make the view follow keyboard focus. You can turn off image smoothing.
• Hover Text. Accessibility → Hover Text. Hold ⌘ and point at any text, and it appears in a large high-contrast panel, with a font and colours you choose. For reading one label or one menu item, this beats magnifying the whole display.
• Text size. Accessibility → Display → Text size raises text across the system and per app. If your problem is "everything is slightly too small, all the time", this is a better answer than zooming all day.
• Increase contrast, Reduce transparency, Differentiate without colour, Invert colours and Colour filters. All in Accessibility → Display.
• Pointer size and colour. Same panel. Make the pointer large and give it a colour that survives both dark editors and white documents.
• VoiceOver. A full screen reader, free and built in, if you want speech.

If that stack covers your day, stop here and keep your money. Gaze does not replace any of it, and no paid app will magnify better than the system does for plain reading.

Where the built-in zoom runs out

Four specific things. Each one is small on its own and adds up over a few hours.

You have to hold something to zoom

macOS zoom needs a modifier key plus scroll, or a keyboard shortcut. A plain two-finger pinch – the gesture you already use in Preview and Safari – is not available for the screen itself. If you zoom five times an hour that is nothing. If you zoom five times a minute, it is the difference between a tool and an obstacle.

The lens will not stay put

Picture-in-Picture follows your pointer. You cannot lock it onto one region – a slide, a figure, a line of a table – and then go type somewhere else while it holds. Anything that needs "keep this enlarged while I work over here" is out of reach.

Nothing can be frozen

A lecture slide advances. A video keeps playing. A dashboard refreshes. There is no built-in way to stop the screen and read it at your own pace.

Your zoom is invisible to everyone else

The system zoom is applied to your display after the image that screen capture reads, so it does not appear in screenshots, recordings or screen shares. When you want to send someone exactly what you are looking at, or share your screen in a remote class, they get the unmagnified version. The full explanation is here.

What Gaze adds

Pinch to zoom, no keys held

In Gaze Settings → Zoom → Trackpad, choose Just Pinch. A two-finger pinch zooms the screen. Nothing to hold, nothing to remember. Normal scrolling keeps working as it always did. This is in the free version.

Magnification you can tune

Up to 8× on a slider. A follow-speed control, where lower is smoother – worth turning down if a fast-moving view makes you lose your place. Optional fixed zoom steps, so you land on the same magnification every time instead of hunting for it. Hotkeys for everything, all remappable.

A lens you can pin

Drag a box around what matters and pin it. That region stays magnified in place while you keep clicking and typing underneath it. This is the one people describe as the reason they stopped fighting their screen: the figure stays big, and your hands stay free.

Freeze the frame

Stop the live screen. Read it at your pace. Draw on it, measure it, copy or save it with your marks. When the thing you need to read refuses to stand still, this is the answer.

Find your pointer

Dim everything except a circle around the cursor, and ripple every click. Adjustable radius. On a large display, or when zoomed in far, losing the pointer costs more time than anything else on this list.

It shows up when you share

Because Gaze magnifies inside the captured frame, a screenshot, a recording or a screen share carries your zoomed view. Sending a classmate or a support desk exactly what you see, rather than describing it, stops being a chore.

Coming from ZoomText on Windows

ZoomText is the standard low-vision tool on Windows and there has never been a Mac version. If you are switching, here is the honest mapping rather than a sales pitch:

So: on a Mac the job is split across built-in tools plus one paid piece, instead of a single suite. Two of the three big ZoomText pillars are already on your Mac for nothing.

What Gaze is not

Stated plainly, because this is the part that decides whether the rest of the page is worth trusting.

• Not a screen reader. Gaze has no speech output of any kind. If you need text read aloud, VoiceOver is free and built into your Mac.
• Not a colour or contrast tool. No filters, no inversion, no theme changes. macOS does all of that already, better, for free.
• Not a full ZoomText replacement. It covers the magnification pillar, not the suite.
• Not a medical or prescribed device, and it makes no claim about accessibility standards or compliance. It is a magnifier for a Mac, written by one person.
• Not a substitute for setting up the built-in accessibility features. Do those first.

Gaze needs two macOS permissions to work: Screen Recording, because magnifying live content means reading the screen, and Accessibility, for global hotkeys. Nothing it reads leaves your Mac. macOS re-checks the Screen Recording grant periodically and after system updates – that prompt comes from Apple, not from Gaze.

Price, and what to do if it is a problem

The core is free forever, with no account: smooth zoom that follows your cursor, pinch and wheel zoom, all hotkeys, and the cursor spotlight. Pro adds the pinned lens, freeze and annotation, click ripples and cursor styles. Pro is $19 once – not a subscription – covering up to three of your Macs. Try every Pro feature free for 14 days before buying, with no card or automatic charge. See our Refund Policy for purchase terms.

Support

Gaze is made by one person, and hello@iney.app goes straight to them. There is no phone line and no ticket queue – writing that down honestly seems better than pretending otherwise.

What that does buy you is speed. The most recent example: a report that pinch-to-zoom would not turn on arrived one morning, and the fixed build was on this site the same evening. When something is in the way of your work, say so, and it gets looked at that day.