It is June 9th 2025, Craig Federighi introduces himself to this year’s WWDC keynote and is visibly excited. This keynote is supposed to change everything, change how we perceive Apple. Right then and there, Alan Dye, VP of Human Interface introduced the world to Liquid Glass, the new design language for Apple products. From the very beginning, it is evident that this is not just a simple border with a backdrop-filter. Layers below the liquid glass containers refract as if the container was a genuine piece of glass (or as if your screen had a water droplet on it).

It’s quite interesting, and they clearly took quite some effort to polish the visuals of this new interface material, but as the design sizzle reel displays on the livestream, some designers around the world are wondering: Did Apple forget about accessibility?

Tim Apple Cook, Apple’s current CEO, has had quite a history of talking about accessibility. In 2025, he stated that “accessibility is part of [Apple’s] DNA” (1), and 10 years before that, he even said “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind […] I don’t consider the bloody ROI” in front of their annual shareholder meeting (2). Accessibility and the way people can interface with Apple products have clearly been in his mind for a long time but despite that, Apples recent design direction leads to interfaces that are generally harder to read or understand.

What’s the problem?

To put it simply: Readability. At least from the early looks through the developer preview and Apple’s own trailer, a lot of labels and icons have an incredibly low contrast rate as low as 1.45:1. This would put Apple below any design system I’ve tested (Material 3, Microsoft’s Fluent) and in an area where even I, a person with good eye-sight and no color-blindness, have a hard time reading anything.

Well, I might be able to.

But my mother probably won’t.

And my grandmother definitely won’t.

But it is not only the colors. Due to the glossy transparent nature of Apple’s new surface material, contents below those surfaces bleed into text labels and icons with almost no “surface overlay” forcing contrast between text label and background. This “bleeding” can hardly be avoided, as the backdrop of a liquid glass container can virtually be anything. Apple has said that labels and icons will automatically adjust to light/dark themes based on the backdrop. However, it’s not clear if this works outside constructed demos with gradients or image content that switches between light and dark areas often.

And how do we fix it?

First, I don’t want to sound like a “know-it-all” designer. I am sure Apple is aware of the feedback they’ve received and if readability is a priority to them, it will eventually be improved. The interfaces we see right now are still in a “beta” like state through the developer preview, and the sizzle reels other design teams such as those working for Microsoft or Google have shown that the initial introduction is often the design vision of an entirely different team than those who will have to implement the design system.

text-shadow a lá Vista

One way to fix readability could be to add even more effects to clearly outline text and icons on the liquid glass surface. Windows Vista and Windows 7, for example, used a black text label on a blurred white glow to highlight the title bar text and other elements on their transparent glossy surfaces.

I can see why apple would not opt into such tricks, as they pollute the visual design even more and might lead to a visual overload. They have also showcased lightly colored icons on a lightly colored surface, which would not be compatible with this little “trick”.

Frost the glass

Another option could be to make the surface look more frosted by a general white overlay and a higher blur effect. While it does diminish the “wow” effect of the refractions of the glass surface, it also greatly improves readability.

I can see Apple utilizing this “frosted liquid glass” more in the coming weeks and months, especially for containers with text labels or icons, as shown in some instances in their showcase video.

Conclusion

Liquid Glass is still in its early days. Heck, you can’t even prototype it in Figma yet.

While I don’t know if and how much these issues have the necessary weight within the team internally, I hope that they take care of it ahead of iOS 26’s release and launch this new “vibe” of Apple with the required polish it needs and people have expected from Apple in the past.

Notes

• (1) - apple.com
• (2) - forbes.com