What It’s For And How To Turn It On

Opinions on Chromebooks can be a little mixed at times. Laptops such as the Acer Chromebook Plus 515 are often a go-to for budget-conscious students. Conversely, there are also several reasons someone shouldn’t buy a Chromebook. But counter to that previous “conversely,” Chromebooks also hide a lot of useful laptop-changing features. Kind of like auto-clicking.

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But what even is the auto-click feature on a Chromebook? Well, it’s basically what the name implies: An option to have your Chromebook click your mouse (or touchpad) for you, without having to perform a physical clicking action. In practice, it allows you to move the cursor around as you typically would, except now instead of clicking you simply stop moving the cursor when it’s over or near the item you want to click on. Once the cursor stops moving for a preset amount of time, the Chromebook will perform a click.

Auto-click can be fine-tuned to work as several different kinds of clicks, lets you decide how long the delay between cursor stoppage and automated clicking will be, and can be adjusted so that you don’t have to land the cursor directly on a particular icon or menu option for it to work. It’s something that Google says could be “…helpful for users with motor impairments.”

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Auto-click is easy to use once it’s set up, but you do need to perform a little menu diving to set it up in the first place.

1. Press Alt + Shift + S on the keyboard, or click on the clock in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Then select Settings from the menu that appears.
2. Select Accessibility, then scroll down to the Mouse and touchpad section.
3. Turn on Automatically click when the mouse cursor stops.
4. Additionally, use the Delay before click setting to choose how long you want the system to wait before interpreting inaction as a click.
5. Adjust Movement threshold to give your clicks a larger radius, so you don’t have to be quite as precise with the cursor.
6. Stabilize click location will lock your cursor’s auto-click radius to one spot until you move the cursor outside of the ring.
7. If you’re using auto-click for other types of clicks (right-click, double-click, etc), use Revert to left click after action to have it default back to a left-click once another click action is performed.

You can also set up auto-click for other types of click actions via the menu in the bottom-right. Auto-click can be set up for Right-click, Double-click, Click and drag, Scroll, or Toggle menu position.

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