A mechanism is provided for magnifying information with contextual information. The user may configure the magnification mechanism to present some contextual information along with the focus being magnified. Particularly, a user may set "look ahead" and "look behind" parameters to specify a number of words or characters to include before and after the magnified word or words. The actual magnified word or words may be distinguished from the contextual information. For example, the word or words being magnified may be magnified to a size that is larger than that of the contextual information. The magnification mechanism may also present a magnified display of image information.