Press T to pick the text tool, then click anywhere on screen. A blinking caret appears where you clicked, inside a dashed box that shows where your words will go. Type, and they show up as you type them. Press Esc to finish; the dashed box disappears and the text stays where you put it, in your current colour and stroke width.

The dashed box is a guide, not part of your annotation. It disappears when you press Esc, and it is never saved as part of the text. It is on the overlay while you type, though, so anyone watching a shared screen sees it too, and a screenshot taken mid-label will include it. Press Esc first if you want the label without the box around it.

Press Return for a new line. A label can be as many lines as you like. Esc is what finishes it, so Return is free to mean what it means everywhere else.

Right-click clears everything on screen, text included, the same as it does for ink.

Switching tools while you are typing

The tool keys are letters, so while a caret is open they are typed, pressing R puts an “R” in your label rather than picking the rectangle. That is what you want nine times out of ten, and there are three ways out of it:

Hold Cmd. Cmd+R picks the rectangle, Cmd+P the pen, and so on for every tool key. Your text is committed first, exactly as if you had pressed Esc.
Press Esc, then the plain letter.
Click the tool in the control panel.

Every other shortcut keeps working normally while you type. Cmd+Q to quit, Shift+Cmd+C to take a screenshot, and the rest. Only the bare letters and digits go into your label.

What you need to grant

The text tool needs Accessibility. Without it, pressing T does nothing. Cue Canvas will not silently swallow the click, it just will not select the tool.

Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, switch Cue Canvas on, then quit Cue Canvas and open it again. macOS does not apply the permission to an app that was already running.

Why it needs a permission the other tools don’t

Every other tool draws with an ordinary click-and-drag inside Cue Canvas’s own window. Typing is different: Cue Canvas is deliberately built to never take your keyboard focus away from whatever you’re presenting, so a normal “receive keystrokes” mechanism isn’t available to it. Accessibility lets it read your keystrokes without stealing focus from the app you’re sharing.

Fixing a label after you have placed it

Double-click committed text with the text tool to reopen it for editing: the caret comes back with your words already in it, and Esc commits the edited version over the original. Cmd+Z undoes the edit and brings the original back.

To move it, press V for the select tool, click the text, and drag.

To remove one, press V for the select tool, click the label, and press Delete. Cmd+Z brings it back.

What it does not do yet

Changing the colour or size of text already placed. The palette and width controls apply to the next thing you type, not to what is already on screen.

If the text tool does nothing

Pressing T doesn’t select it. Check the Accessibility permission above, then quit and reopen Cue Canvas.
Clicking does not show a caret. The dashed box and blinking bar appear as soon as you click, before you type anything. If nothing appears, the text tool is not actually active. Check the Accessibility permission above.
A letter you press ends up in the label instead of changing tool. That is the caret doing its job; hold Cmd with the tool key, or press Esc first. See Switching tools while you are typing above.

Type a label on screen