HoverLingua / Accessibility

Built with
native controls.

Last updated: 12 October 2026

HoverLingua is a Mac app built with standard macOS controls, so it follows many of the accessibility settings you already use. This page describes what the current app supports, where it falls short, and how to tell us what would help.

Appearance

• Dark Mode. HoverLingua follows your Mac's Light or Dark appearance and uses system colors throughout.
• Reduce Motion. The app adds no animations of its own. Standard window and control animations follow your macOS Reduce Motion setting.
• Contrast and transparency. Because the app uses system colors and controls, Increase Contrast and Reduce Transparency in System Settings → Accessibility → Display apply to them.
• Zoom. macOS Zoom works with HoverLingua like any other app.

Listen to text

Click Listen above the original or the translated text to have it read aloud with a system voice installed on your Mac. In Settings → Speech you can set the speaking speed from 50% to 150% and choose a voice for each language. Automatic picks the best installed voice. More voices, including Enhanced and Premium voices, are available in System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content.

Reading and reusing text

Recognized text and translations appear side by side as real, selectable text, not images. You can edit either column, translate your corrected text again, or click Copy to use it in another app, such as a screen reader, Braille display, or a larger-text editor. Tables are copied as tab-separated text.

Keyboard

• Command–Return: capture and translate (in the overlay), or translate the edited text (in the translation window)
• Command–Shift–O: show the overlay
• Command–Comma: open Settings
• Command–W: close the active window
• Command–Q: quit

Buttons and menus are standard macOS controls, and they can be reached with keyboard navigation when it is turned on in System Settings → Keyboard.

VoiceOver

Controls use standard macOS buttons, menus, checkboxes, and text views. Icon-only buttons, such as Prepare Languages and Swap Languages, have spoken names and tooltips. The capture rectangle is announced as “Screen region to translate”.

We haven't completed a full VoiceOver review yet. In particular, HoverLingua doesn't yet announce status changes automatically. These include “Translation updated” while Live is on, so you may need to move to the status text to hear it.

Known limitations

• Choosing what to translate means moving and resizing the overlay window over text on screen. This is easiest with a pointing device.
• Recognition works best on clear, printed text. Handwriting, low-contrast text, and tilted images are less accurate.
• Protected content and some system screens can't be captured.

Feedback

If something in HoverLingua is hard to use with your setup, we'd like to hear about it. Tell us which assistive technology you use (for example VoiceOver, Voice Control, or Switch Control), your macOS version, and what you were trying to do.