Reduce Transparency Works Again in macOS Tahoe 26.3

The freshly released macOS Tahoe 26.3 update has resolved an accessibility issue where the “Reduce Transparency” feature was not working properly on the Mac. Before macOS Tahoe 26.3, toggling the switch on would leave considerable transparent effects, including in sidebars, headers, titlebars, search boxes, and more, leading to situations where text would overlap and interface elements would be washed out with blurry colors and interface elements. Now with macOS Tahoe 26.3, this issue, which had surfaced originally in 26.1 and 26.2, has finally been resolved.

The Liquid Glass redesign of macOS Tahoe has received significant criticism from the Apple user community, often because of perceived reductions in usability, legibility, and user experience. With all of the translucent and transparent interface elements, many Tahoe users initially used an Accessibility feature called “Reduce Transparency” to make the interface easier to read and interact with, but in a bizarre turnaround or bug, the Reduce Transparency feature was broken in macOS Tahoe 26.2 and 26.1 leaving tons of interface elements transparent and difficult to interact with.

If you have been annoyed with the excessive transparency and visual chaos of the macOS Tahoe interface, you’ll want to update to macOS Tahoe 26.3 again as soon as possible, so that you can use the newly effective Reduce Transparency Accessibility toggle.

You can access the setting through  Apple menu > System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce Transparency.

With the setting toggled on, transparency is finally removed from title areas, toolbars, and sidebars throughout the operating system and many apps, making them much easier to read and interact with.

As you can see in the screenshot below with the feature enabled, Reduce Transparency properly removes transparency from Finder elements including the sidebar, toolbar, and titlebar:

In prior versions of Tahoe, all of these areas would remain transparent – even with Reduce Transparency enabled – resulting in overlapping text and interface elements, leading some users to find the interface visually chaotic or difficult to interact with. You can see an example screenshot of this visual bug (or perhaps it was intentional behavior) below:

Without Reduce Transparency enabled on the Mac, Liquid Glass continues to overlap text and place text (!) and user interface elements including toggles (!) with colors underneath headers, titles, sidebars, search bars, and elsewhere, leading to a significant amount of visual clutter. It’s awkward enough that I consider the Reduce Transparency accessibility feature basically essential to gain some usability in the MacOS Liquid Glass implementation. It’s genuinely surprising that multiple teams and layers of management at Apple saw any of this and shipped it as the default state of the macOS Tahoe UI:

Now with this feature working properly again in Tahoe 26.3, Mac users can stop overlapping text and weird legibility issues again in Tahoe by simply toggling the feature ON.

While this isn’t some new feature or major change to some users, if you have been bothered by the excessive translucent and transparent interface elements in macOS Tahoe, you will find that macOS Tahoe 26.3 is a welcome patch to your Tahoe experience.

What do you think of Reduce Transparency, do you use it in macOS Tahoe? Do you like the visual transparency effects? Do they annoy you? Whatever the case, if you’re a Tahoe user you’ll want to install macOS Tahoe 26.3. Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.