Re-enable Snow Leopard’s ‘Screen Zoom’ feature in Lion

Snow Leopard had a handy feature (I’m pretty certain it’s enabled by default, but maybe someone could clarify?) where if you held down ctrl and scrolled, the screen would zoom in and out. Lion seems to remove this feature but thanks to the Mac Observer’s article on Lion & Zoom I have worked out how to re-enable it to work just how it did before.

  1. Open Universal Access in System Preferences.
  2. Tick ‘Enable access for assistive devices’ if it isn’t already ticked.
  3. Switch Zoom ‘On’. This enables keyboard shortcuts for zooming in and out, but not the scroll to zoom functionality in Snow Leopard.
  4. Click ‘Options…’ and in the pane that opens tick the bottom box ‘Use scroll wheel with modifier keys to zoom’ and set the modifier key to whatever you like (I think in Snow Leopard it was ctrl). Optionally tweak the ‘When zoomed in, the screen image moves:’ to whatever you want (again, Snow Leopard was ‘Continuously with pointer’)
  5. Done!
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