Dear Forum,
I am a visually impaired PhD student who has to use his laptop a lot for work. After experiencing some nasty pain in my right wrist that doesn't seem to go away easily, I thought I should improve the ergonomics of my working place, so I got myself a vertical mouse to use instead of the built-in trackpad. Now, when I'm reading stuff with zoom, my mouse device keeps drifting away to the right. As a read a text line by line, every time I pull the mouse back to the left to start a new line, the pointer moves properly but the mouse device itself ends up further to the right than it started at the previous line. Currently, I resort to lifting the mouse from the table so that it doesn't move the pointer and putting it back in place, but I have to do this over and over again. I don't know if I'm just to stupid to use a mouse or if this has something to do with Apples internal Zoom settings. I use a full screen zoom that follows the pointer and tries to keep it centred. This works just fine with the trackpad. With a different mouse from the office here I experienced the same problem, so I don't think that it's the mouses fault. Did anyone ever encounter something similar?
Technical Data: I'm using a 14 '' MacBook Pro with Apple M1 Chip from 2021 and MacOS Ventura (13.0).
PS: I cannot always use VoiceOver to read text, because it often includes a lot of mathematical formulae and VoiceOver still often times fails on them.
Comments
Sounds like a hardware issue
If I understand correctly, when you move the vertical mouse back to the left to move the pointer to the left side of the screen, the vertical mouse ends up further to the right than the last time you had the pointer at the left of the screen. Is that right?
If so, it may be a tracking issue. I would recommend trying a different surface. You can get a mousepad. Some mice also have accelaration curves built into their sensors which can throw off tracking. Unfortunately there's little you can do for the latter, save for cursing the engineers who chose that particular sensor. Some mice can change their tracking speed, usually referred to as DPI. Each mouse does it differently, so it's worth looking into your mouse's documentation to see how to do this. It might help make up for a less-than-ideal sensor.