Apple recently unveiled something visually stunning in its latest OS updates: a new design language called Liquid Glass. It stretches across iOS, macOS, iPadOS, watchOS, even visionOS. Think blurred transparency, light refractions, responsive highlights. Everything looks fluid, layered, and vaguely futuristic. But under all the shimmer, there’s a deeper issue: what does this mean for accessibility?
Let’s unpack it.
Liquid Glass is Apple’s new system-wide material. Imagine a semi-transparent pane that distorts the background—not just blurred like we’ve seen in previous versions, but reacting to light, movement, and color in real-time. Apple calls it their most extensive visual redesign ever. Toolbars, buttons, even widgets now appear as layers of shimmering glass. It’s elegant, expressive, and unmistakably Apple.
On the iOS Lock Screen, for instance, numbers now glide behind your wallpaper’s subject. On macOS, menus float with a new “Clear” appearance mode that shows your desktop right through them. Every corner is rounded. Every surface subtly reflects or diffuses what’s behind it. It’s a sensory experience—and a technical feat.
What makes Liquid Glass different from the simple frosted effects we’ve seen in the past is how context-aware it is. The color, blur, and brightness of each element shifts depending on your wallpaper, the lighting conditions, and even how you’re interacting with your device. It feels dynamic, alive, and personalized.
But also: a usability puzzle.
This isn’t Apple’s first dance with glossy UI.
So Liquid Glass is a spiritual descendant of all this—a high-tech evolution of Apple’s frosted glass look, now with dynamic depth and more sophisticated lighting. It’s flat design’s more glamorous sibling.
The influence of AR and Apple’s Vision Pro is also evident here. Glass in that context isn’t just a visual choice—it’s a medium through which digital elements float and coexist with the real world. Liquid Glass tries to bring some of that three-dimensional interaction to the two-dimensional screen. It’s a conceptual bridge.
Here’s where things get tricky.
When everything is translucent, the background becomes part of the UI. That’s fine when it’s a clean wallpaper. But what about a photo? Or a busy map? Text can quickly become unreadable. Apple uses vibrancy effects to try and maintain legibility—but it’s not bulletproof. For users with low vision or color sensitivity, this can make using the device genuinely harder.
Even for users without any impairment, readability can suffer depending on ambient lighting and the background behind elements. A button that looks sleek on a static mockup might disappear entirely in practice.
Liquid Glass moves. It reacts to scrolling. It glides. It morphs. For some users—especially those with vestibular disorders or sensitivity to motion—that’s a problem. Apple does offer “Reduce Motion” in accessibility settings, but the default experience still assumes motion is delightful, not disorienting.
This ties into a broader issue: default design choices often cater to ideal scenarios and ideal users. But real-world usage is diverse. Assuming delight equals comfort can backfire.
If the UI is constantly shifting—light levels changing, backgrounds bleeding through, elements floating—it becomes harder to focus. The visual hierarchy suffers. Not everyone finds that beautiful; some find it exhausting.
For users with ADHD or neurodivergent conditions, too much visual noise can become overwhelming. When everything moves, glows, and layers, the line between content and context blurs.
Apple made it easy to adopt Liquid Glass with new APIs. But using them responsibly? That’s up to designers and developers. Ensuring accessibility, testing contrast, honoring system settings—none of that is handled automatically.
And when the design trend is driven from the top down, developers feel pressure to implement it—even if they don’t have the resources to do proper accessibility QA. That creates a gap between aesthetic intent and inclusive execution.
Apple’s design team clearly wants to bring a sense of joy, depth, and materiality to software. Liquid Glass feels inspired by the spatial UI of Vision Pro—bringing AR design metaphors into flat interfaces. It’s beautiful. But it also highlights an uncomfortable truth:
Sometimes, beauty excludes.
We’ve seen this before with neumorphism. Visual trends rise fast, but if they don’t consider all users, they fall just as fast. Accessibility can’t be a toggle buried in Settings—it should be part of the design conversation from day one.
When design becomes performance, usability becomes collateral damage.
Design isn’t just for ideal use cases. It’s for everyone. It needs to be tested like that.
Liquid Glass is a beautiful idea—and a technically impressive one. But its success shouldn’t be measured by how good it looks in a keynote. It should be measured by how well it works for everyone.
Accessibility isn’t an edge case. It’s the baseline.
The future of UI may be transparent, dynamic, and immersive—but it also needs to be readable, stable, and kind.
As designers, developers, and users, we need to keep asking the hard question: who gets left out when software gets shiny?
That’s where the real work begins.
