How to make windows and dialog boxes more visually distinct?

By BenJammin, 19 April, 2015

Forum
Low Vision Accessibility on Apple Products

As a partially-sighted user with substantial useful vision, I am having difficulty discerning which window or dialog box has the system focus.
I am looking for a way to make the active window or box more distinct.

Potential solutions might include:
- Increasing the thickness of window/box borders
- dimming the background behind the active window/box

Is there an app or setting that might make this possible.

Options

Comments

By Unuhinuiʻi on Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - 21:26

Inverted colors might work for you.
With VoiceOver on/off - so you can get a thick white box to show where you are. (Or black box if the regular colors work better for you). I use both, leaning heavily to VO.
Also try increated contrast etc settings in Accessibility.

By dvdmth on Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - 21:26

There is an app in the Mac app store called HazeOver which will dim background windows. You can choose either to have the current window highlighted or to have all windows of the current app highlighted. All other windows are dimmed, and you can control how much they are dimmed.

The app isn't perfect and has a few quirks, but it works reasonably well.

You might also get some benefit from having multiple desktops, ore spaces. By running different apps in different spaces, they will not be visible on screen at the same time. This is a feature of Mission Control, and I use it when I have several apps open at once to keep their windows from cluttering my view of the screen.