Comment by layer8
5 months ago
It’s not really a bug, it’s a side effect of the heavier blur resulting in more average colors for the backgrounds of UI controls, reducing contrast with the text and icons in the foreground. Instead of blurring whatever is behind the controls, they’d have to choose actual solid backgrounds for UI controls, but the whole Liquid Glass concept largely abandons that.
It's definitely a bug that high contrast no longer provides high contrast in the liquid glass setting. It doesn't matter if that is the logical outcome of a series of events and choices that were made to that point, it's a breaking change in behavior, therefore a bug.
Bugs aren't always NPEs. Business Logic bugs are still bugs.
There is no “high contrast”. Increase Contrast has roughly the same (limited) effects it always had (enhancing the presentation of specific UI controls in specific ways), hence it’s not broken. What I’m saying is that Reduce Transparency is reducing contrast in a way that is orthogonal to, and isn’t prevented by, also having Increase Contrast turned on.
Features like Night Shift also happen to reduce contrast. That doesn’t mean they are buggy, or that Increase Contrast is buggy.
It does mean that Reduce Transparency is not suitable if you don’t want reductions in contrast compared to regular-transparency Liquid Glass, regardless of whether you also use Increase Contrast.
I do agree that Liquid Glass as a whole is broken for anyone needing a higher-contrast UI. In my opinion, a GUI should be reasonably high-contrast by default, without special accessibility settings.