Apple no longer cares about disabled people.

Transparent UI, with controls sitting on top of arbitrary and changing content can NEVER be legible/discernible. Apple knows this, but fashion was more important than function and they decided, "who cares about disabled people, anyway."

Microsoft learned this lesson back in the Vista era but Apple's charging ahead with this terrible set of changes that will literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.

It's a sad day when a company that has often lead in accessibility ships the least accessible OS in modern history. I guess it was a nice run having a Big Tech company to point to as a good example of doing various accessibility things well. Damn.

Apple's accessibility features enabled my mother to enjoy what little independence she had due to a rare debilitating illness [Multiple System Atrophy].

She could read eBooks & emails, listen to audio books, view photos and call her family by herself (iPhone use extends to many uncles/aunties/cousins).

Every few months I would help her recalibrate her iPad as it was a vital life line.

It might be more accurate to say that they are giving non-disabled people an experience akin to that of disabled people. ;)

> literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.

I'm confused. You're condemning them for not accommodating the disabled, yet admitting they provide an accommodation in the same sentence.

I've been submitting endless feedback about how Liquid Arse breaks dark mode during the beta. I keep seeing dark text on dark backgrounds all over the place in both Tahoe and iOS 26, for example: https://imgur.com/a/R3DTcSd

I've pretty much given up with submitting feedback though.

> Apple no longer cares about disabled people.

Did you enable the relevant accessibility options that are there for this purpose?

It's unreadable even for normal people least to say for disabled folks.

Tahoe is Apple's very own "Windows 8".

Changing toolbars to text-only is pretty bad. The button hotboxes are tiny

Generally I think the toolbar settings needed more testing, they can be wonky (e.g. in Automator for text+icon it causes the traffic lights to misalign, in Safari toggling the sidebar on and off is janky).

Much the same on Linux with Wayland.

I haven't touched Windows for over a decade, does it still have a decent story for disabilities? They've certainly regressed in other areas ...

This is what happens when designers are treated as royalty and are told that their new "clothes" are "awesome" all the time.

It's also a symptom of consumption addiction where there is demand/motivation for drastic, superficial changes that don't really offer any value except to those who are consumed by the need for constant change for change's sake.

Apple used to care more about disabled people because of how the Accessibility APIs worked and were required for most apps.

You can turn off the transparency in the accessibility settings. Sure products could be 100% accessible out of the box but unless you had some sort of limit on that it would likely make the experience worse for the majority of users. I can’t imagine Helvetica Neue Extra Light was particularly accessible as the system font a decade ago - but there were accessibility settings.

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