How To: Enlarge Notifications on Android to Make Them Easier to Read

Problems with eyesight affect people of all ages and walks of life. And while it is possible to increase font sizes on Android, even the "Huge" setting is neither big nor clear enough for a lot of folks.

We've covered a set of tweaks that can make most of Android's interface a lot easier to set up, but notifications can still be a bit on the thin and small side visually. So the development team behind BIG Launcher—a maximized home screen replacement—created an app that will display notifications with big, bold, and easy-to-read text. It's a perfect compliment to our other readability tweaks, so folks with vision problems will love this one.

Step 1: Install BIG Notifications

The app behind it all is called BIG Notifications, and it's available for free on the Google Play Store. Search it by name to get it installed, or head directly to the install page at this link.

Step 2: Activate the Notification Listener Service

When you first launch BIG Notifications, the app will ask you to activate a notification listener service. This is how it enlarges your notifications, so tap the "Continue" button. From here, tick the box next to the "BIG Notifications" entry, then press OK on the popup.

Step 3: Viewing Your Big Notifications

At this point, you're all set up. BIG Notifications offers a few interface customization options, but these require an in-app purchase of $2.

From now on, when you want to view your notifications at a much larger scale, just tap the "Enlarge Notifications" button in your notification tray.

The notifications will be displayed in a bold, high-contrast format, and the size of the font is of course very big.

Has this app helped make it easier to read your notifications? Let us know in the comment section below, or drop us a line on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter.