Stop Overlapping Text & Legibility Issues on macOS Tahoe with “Reduce Transparency”

The Liquid Glass interface of macOS Tahoe 26 can provide some accessibility and legibility challenges for some Mac users, and one of the recurring complaints is the heavy usage of transparency and translucency can lead to text overlapping other text throughout the operating system. Whether it’s a sidebar, menu, messages, or window, having text atop text is never a great user experience and is always difficult to read, and since it happens with regularity on the Mac now thanks to the new Liquid Glass appearance, it’s a good thing to address specifically.

If you have already read our guide on reducing Liquid Glass on macOS Tahoe then you likely won’t be experiencing the overlapping text problems as you’ve already made an appropriate settings change, so this article isn’t for you. This is for the Mac users who have updated to Tahoe and now find legibility to be challenging due to text being overlaid atop other text throughout the operating system. And, once again, a buried Accessibility setting called “Reduce Transparency” will come to the rescue here to make the user interface more usable on the Mac by preventing text from overlapping.

How to Prevent Overlapping Text on macOS Tahoe by Using Reduce Transparency

1. From the  APPLE menu go to “System Settings” and then go to “Accessibility”
2. Go to “Display” and toggle the switch for “Reduce Transparency” to the ON position



3. This removes most translucency/transparency from the Liquid Glass interface and should prevent text being visible under other text

There are some other perks to using “Reduce Transparency” as well extending beyond increased legibility and usability of Liquid Glass, including potential performance improvements, but it does come at the sacrifice of Apple’s intended vision of Liquid Glass on the Mac, which is heavy usage of transparency and translucency just about everywhere that it can be applied.

It’s possible that overlapping text like what is shown in the screenshots is not intentional, maybe it’s a bug, maybe it was overlooked, or maybe the Liquid Glass interface was not quite finished to the level of refinement many Mac users would expect, who knows, but I would imagine that even people at Apple who use Macs can’t see that sort of thing and be thrilled with it, it looks and feels too sloppy.

Was the Liquid Glass interface change on the Mac even necessary? Is it an improvement over what it replaced in Sequoia? Opinions are mixed on this dramatically, some users don’t seem to notice or care, others love the Liquid Glass look, and some hate it. One former Apple engineer describes the interface changes in Tahoe as “mostly not awful, but everything they changed is worse”, which is an assessment in line with my own views on the Liquid Glass look (which I think looks much better on iPhone than it does on the Mac, for what it’s worth).

It’s quite likely that these sort of accessibility and legibility issues will be resolved in future macOS Tahoe updates, perhaps has MacOS 26.1, 26.2, 26.3, so be sure to update your Mac as system updates become available. Quirks like this are also why some Mac users hold off on upgrading to Tahoe initially at least until later point release bug fix updates become available, which is what I’m doing on my primary Mac work setup, but I did jump into Tahoe on a secondary Mac so that I could gain more direct experience. I was hoping for an experience like I had with iOS 26 on iPhone, where Liquid Glass quickly grew on me after a strong initial negative reaction, but so far that hasn’t been the case – yet.