Troubleshooting Display Probs

[maehara]

A plea for help, as I'm drawing a complete blank trying to figure this one out.

Came home today to find the display on the Mac essentially unreadable - brightness & contrast both pushed up so high you can't make anything out. It's a software thing - if I user switch to my other half's account, everything returns to normal, switch back to my own account and it all goes haywire again. So definitely not a hardware or monitor fault (seems the cat was sleeping on the keyboard, and whatever combination of keypresses that has produced has been the guilty party).

I'm at a loss as to where to start - I've checked under System Prefs, what options there are under Display & Appearances don't cover the problem - anyone able to point me in the right direction?

 

[mkrishnan]

If a cat did this while on your keyboard, it's almost certainly something within the Universal Access Sys Prefs section -- I believe there are one or two high-contrast modes available there that could be doing what you're describing, and they have hotkeys associated with them. So start there.

If that doesn't work, then try going to displays -> color and changing the screen calibration, say to one of the sRGB options (and then you can re-calibrate it). But 99.9% it's Universal Access.

 

[maehara]

If a cat did this while on your keyboard, it's almost certainly something within the Universal Access Sys Prefs section -- I believe there are one or two high-contrast modes available there that could be doing what you're describing, and they have hotkeys associated with them. So start there.

..and that's just what it was. Thank-you!