I Avoided Liquid Glass for a Year. I Wish I Still Could.

I was involved in a lot of the accessibility discourse when Apple first announced Liquid Glass mid 2025, and made my opinions known to Apple as well. Since then, I have managed to avoid updating my phone. Yes, since Liquid Glass was released in September of last year.

Yes, I was still on iOS 18-something.

I know. I can feel you judging me and questioning my life decisions. But was that really so unreasonable? Because avoiding Liquid Glass for that period of time was worth it.

Unfortunately, my winning streak came to an end this week because I’m going to see the musical Death Becomes Her this weekend. I use the Ticketmaster app for my tickets, so I signed in to make sure everything was ready to go. Ticketmaster informed me that I needed to update the app to access my tickets.

Fine.

Except then my phone informed me that I couldn’t update Ticketmaster without updating iOS.

Defeated.

It finally happened.

I avoided it for more than a year, but I need those tickets. And realistically, Ticketmaster is probably just the first of many apps that are going to stop working properly if I can’t update them, and I can’t update them unless I update my phone.

DRAT.

So I updated.

I did take a few minutes to weigh things out first. Do I really need to go to the musical I've been looking forward to this weekend? Do I need all of my apps to function? Maybe I should just let this run its course and get a flip phone. But in the end I decided to do the update.

My phone didn’t explode like I was afraid it might after jumping all the way from iOS 18-something to 26.7.1. Yes, I know. That’s crazy. BUT IS IT?!

Because I have now experienced Liquid Glass on my own device, and avoiding it was 100% worth it. Whatever this parallax/lensing/warping effect is, it’s awful. It’s terrible. It’s disgusting. It’s nauseating. I can barely look at my phone without flaring my vestibular symptoms.

This might be a good time to mention that I had brain surgery in 2022 to remove an acoustic neuroma. I no longer have a functioning vestibular nerve on my right side, and I’m deaf on that side. My brain has had to learn to process balance and visual information differently, including adapting to how my eyes, inner ear, and brain communicate with each other.

So when I say the movement in this interface makes me feel motion sick, I don't mean that figuratively.

The transparency is bad enough. Everything seems layered over everything else. Things look like they're floating. Content moves underneath translucent controls. The interface refracts and shifts as you scroll.

I immediately started digging through the accessibility settings.

Reduce Transparency helped. Tinted Liquid Glass didn't help as much. Increase Contrast didn't solve any problems.

And then there’s the movement.

THE MOVEMENT.

I tried Reduce Motion. Somehow, that was worse. Because I don't necessarily need things to stop moving. Motion can give me useful information. When something opens, closes, moves, expands, or returns to where it came from, that visual transition helps me understand what happened and where I should look next.

With Reduce Motion turned on, some of those visual cues disappear. Things appear and disappear differently, and I lose information that was helping me follow what was happening on the screen. I don't just need less motion; I need BETTER MOTION.

So now my options are apparently to keep the motion that helps me understand where things are going AND get the nauseating Liquid Glass effects, or reduce the Liquid Glass movement AND lose predictable visual transitions that help me orient myself.

WHY CAN'T I JUST SET THE MOTION TO HOW IT USED TO BE?!?!

Before I get too heated in my rant, I'm going to bring this back to something I say all the time: Accessibility should be the standard.

Why should a disabled person have to navigate through multiple settings on an inaccessible device to try to make the device accessible enough to use?

Start with accessible. Then, if someone wants extra transparency, refraction, floating layers, morphing effects, and fancy movement, let them turn those things on. Or at least make it simple and possible to turn them off.

I genuinely cannot think of an accessibility benefit to making the interface more transparent or adding all of this decorative movement and distortion by default. If I'm missing one, please tell me. I'd actually like to know.

It's great that features like Eye Tracking and Head Tracking and Voice Control and Switch Control exist for accessibility purposes. It's great to have Assistive Touch options and haptics and Touch Accommodations. (If anyone has used these and can comment on how well they function, please reach out).

And look. I understand that some people like Liquid Glass. Do I think you're wrong? Yes.

But that's beside the point.

I'm completely fine with giving people different ways to customize how their devices look and behave. Want everything to look like translucent glass? Go for it. Want your buttons to morph and refract the content underneath them? Have fun

What I don't understand is why the visually complicated, transparent, moving, depth-filled version needs to be the default, and why the people who physically cannot tolerate it are expected to hunt through accessibility settings trying to dismantle it piece by piece.

Especially when we can't actually dismantle all of it.

I can't choose, "Give me predictable spatial transitions, but remove the decorative movement." I can't choose, "Make the interface visually stable." I can't choose, "Change the motion to how it used to be."

Instead, I'm choosing between different things that still make me dizzy. I'm going to have to tell my eye doctor I am skipping my eye therapy this week because looking at my phone is now way more taxing than anything I'm doing in eye therapy. (Yes, eye therapy is a thing, and I'm happy to share more if you have questions).

Liquid Glass has been around for more than a year now. People raised accessibility concerns when Apple first announced it. I know because I was one of those people raising concerns.

More than a year later, I finally had to update my phone, and after digging through accessibility settings just to make it... a little bit more tolerable? I still can't make my phone work the way I need it to. We can't do better after a year of this?

That's the part that bothers me most. I don't want Apple to take Liquid Glass away from the people who like it. I don't even care if Apple wants to keep inventing increasingly glassy, floaty, wobbly things.

But accessibility isn't deciding which version of an experience works best for everyone. It's recognizing that there isn't one.

If you're going to fundamentally change the way an interface looks, moves, and behaves, give people meaningful control over those changes. Don't make disabled users choose between accessibility features that solve one problem while creating another.

Accessibility shouldn't mean designing an experience first and then giving disabled people a handful of settings to try to make it usable. I shouldn't have to dig through menus trying to undo design choices that are making me physically sick. Accessibility needs to be part of those design choices from the beginning, with enough flexibility for people to use their devices in ways that work for them.

You want Liquid Glass? Great. Make Liquid Glass.

Just don't make it mandatory.