How to get bigger text on iPhone

While it’s true that iPhones have excellent displays, our eyes can’t always match their pin-sharp precision. This can be particularly true if you use the smaller iPhone SE, or hope to move to its rumoured iPhone SE 2 replacement.

Not to worry, though, because if you’re struggling to make out the text in emails, notes and other documents, it might simply be time to increase the size of the font. In this article we show you a couple of easy ways to achieve this and bring a bit of focus back into your life.

Use Settings to change the text size

Adjusting the size of the text on your iPhone is relatively straightforward. Within Settings there is a control to allows you to quickly increase or decrease the scale of text in certain apps. These include Apple’s own Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Phone and Notes, plus any other third-party apps that support the Dynamic Type feature.

To change the size, go to Settings > Display & Brightness > Text Size.

Here you’ll see a slider at the bottom of the screen. Slide it to the right if you want to increase the size of the text and to the left to make it smaller. As you do so the message in the main pane will grow or shrink to show you how apps supporting this feature will display words.

When you’re happy with how it looks, go to an app like Mail and check to see if the new size fits the bill.

Make text bigger using Accessibility

Should you find that you need an even larger font, you can do this by using the Accessibility settings.

Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Larger Text, then turn on the Larger Accessibility Sizes option.

Now you’ll be able to use the slider at the bottom of the screen to make even the smallest text legible.

If this still isn’t ideal then there is the VoiceOver feature in iOS that can read aloud whatever is on the screen. To find out more about this excellent iPhone ability, read our How to use VoiceOver on iPhone feature.