I need a large curser because I have a vision impairment but as you can see in the image, the help / tip on every item in the Tool bar is hidden. This is very frustrating as when I move the curser slightly to see the name, is disappears.
There is an easy solution to this big cursor. You have somehow enlarged the cursor, which is good. But you haven’t enlarged the rest of the screen. So the larger cursor hides important info. You need to enlarge everything on the screen, not just the cursor. To do this, do the following –
- Click the Apple logo in the far NW part of the screen.
- The drop menu that results lets you choose System Preferences.
- In the prefs window, go to the bottom row and click the Accessibility icon.
- In the new window, left column, scroll to and click Zoom.
- The right panel lets you turn zoom on by clicking the first button. Do that. The button becomes blue with a checkmark.
- Look at the various keyboard shortcuts. I use Alt-Command, then press the “equal” key which has both an equal sign and a plus sign on it. The plus sign makes zoom easy to remember.
- To use it in any app or even on your desktop or inside a folder, put the cursor anywhere on the area, then press Alt-Cmd-equal key. You can do this more than once to zoom in even further. You can also fine tune the zoom steps in the Zoom panel.
Now you’ve turned on the zoom function and it will be there until you turn it off, (why would you?). It will always be there for you, in any app, on the desktop (finder), in an open folder.
One tip: when scrolling vertically, use your mouse and scroll bars or mouse scroll wheel, as usual. To move sideways, bump the cursor on either right or left window border.
I use this zooming technique in many apps, including Acorn. I’d be lost without it! And I have never had the problem you are having right now. The nice feature of this zoom function is you can go back to regular view with Alt-Cmd-hyphen key. It’s a beautiful thing! 
Hope this helps!
Dick
Hello @shane
I agree the tooltip is showing up in a bad location for you! I don’t have a good solution for you right now, but I’ll see if I can influence where the tooltip shows up in a future release of Acorn.
Thank you @ccgus, that would be a huge help for me. I have been using Acorn since version 4 and absolutely love it.
I appreciate your reply @Dick and understand your suggestion but no matter how much you zoom the tip is still hidden.
@shane I’ve got a quick question for you. Are there any other apps you use, which used to have this tooltip problem but fixed it for you, or somehow get around the tooltip problem in another way? I’m curious about prior art for what I might eventually do.
Try turning off however you enlarged the pointer. Then if you zoom up everything together, the background will enlarge the same amount as the pointer. If you don’t, the enlarged cursor will always be at a higher enlargement factor than the rest of it, and it will just continue to hide the tool tip, regardless of how much you enlarge it using the Accessibility setting I told you about in my previous reply. I don’t know if this will work, but it’s worth a try.
Dick
There is only one other app I use that has a tool bar and it places the name under the icon:
But that looks really unprofessional (in my opinion). You could have the hover tip appear above the icon, like most websites these days:
Another possible solution perhaps?
Try using Mousecape app which allows you to use custom cursors on Mac OS X. (You’d have to use the supplied editor to design your own set of cursors to replace the standard ones)
I haven’t tried this myself, but relevant links are: