Comment by frereubu
5 months ago
I don't have accessibility issues, but even so I've been a fan of these settings for a few iOS versions now:
Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Reduce Transparency
Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Increase Contrast
Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Differentiate Without Colour
Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Reduce Motion
Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions
To try and make my phone less interesting so I spend less time on it, I also use Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Colour Filters > Greyscale with Intensity turned up to max so it's black and white. If you set Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut to Colour Filters you can toggle this with a triple slick of the side button, in case you want to show someone a photo or something.
The trouble with Reduce Transparency on iOS 26 is that it also reduces contrast (irrespective of Increase Contrast).
Further, "Increase Contrast" turns some CarPlay buttons to have white text on light-cyan backgrounds.
That's absolutely wild.
Sounds like a bug. Probably worth reporting it to get it fixed. Historically, Apple’s accessibility features have been best in class.
3 replies →
Reduce Transparency helps in some ways, but also introduces its own issues. A couple I noticed in the brief time I used it:
* My home screen wallpaper is a blurred version of the astronomy lock screen. After enabling Reduce Transparency, it remains working for ten minutes or so, then gets replaced with a plain black background.
* Websites have a large bottom margin (usually white, sometimes site specific colours) where the toolbar appears if you scroll up. It feels like a complete waste of screen space if you're scrolling down a webpage to read it.
Tested on an iPhone 16 Pro Max 256GB.
I’ve recently been trying out the automations feature in the iOS shortcuts app to turn color filters off/on when opening/closing camera/photos/facetime so I can remove the triple click shortcut. It works well enough. Its disappointing but not surprising that in 2025 on an iPhone 15 pro this isn’t instant and takes a good half second for the color filters to turn off/on.
It works, but it looks even worse. Also the reduced transparency in many apps leads to a letterbox effect, which reduces the available space for content.
Can someone please make me understand why does searching for "Accessibility" in settings doesn't return any results? In fact, none of the search accessibility search terms work, like: "reduce", "transparency", "contrast", "motion".
Searching for "Accessories", "General" works, but for some reason no hits for "Accessibility". I can't for the love of god figure out why would this be the case, is it just a mistake that no one caught, or is it an intentional decision, why would this be intentional?