Tactile: feel a haptic tick over clickable controls anywhere on your Mac (free, open source)

By Mason Chen, 13 July, 2026

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I wanted to share a free, open source Mac app I made called Tactile, in case it is useful to people here. I am the developer, so I am posting in the forum rather than the App Directory, in line with the guidelines.

Tactile taps your Force Touch trackpad whenever the pointer is over something clickable, a button, link, menu, or Dock item, in any app, system-wide. It reads the macOS Accessibility tree to know what kind of element you are on, so the idea is that you can feel where the interactive controls are instead of relying on a faint hover color.

For low-vision use it also adds visual cues that you can turn on: a green or red circle under the pointer (green over clickable, red over destructive), an outline around the control, a large crosshair, and a small label naming the element type. So you can get feel, color, and shape signals for the same control.

To be upfront about fit: it is a pointer aid, so it assumes you are moving and watching or feeling a cursor. It is not a screen reader and does not replace VoiceOver. It needs a Force Touch trackpad (any modern MacBook or a Magic Trackpad) and macOS 14.6 or later. It has no network of its own except its update check, and the Accessibility permission is used only to read the kind of element under the cursor, never content or keystrokes.

It is free and MIT licensed: https://github.com/Mason363/Tactile

I would genuinely value feedback from low-vision users on whether the haptic and visual cues help, and what would make them more useful.

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