I don't have accessibility issues, but even so I've been a fan of these settings...

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.

Sounds like a bug. Probably worth reporting it to get it fixed. Historically, Apple’s accessibility features have been best in class.

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.

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?