On Halloween, the Apple code spelunker known as “pdfu” posted to X about an interesting discovery squirreled away in macOS 27. They wrote macOS Golden Gate contains a hidden accessibility feature called Trackpad Inactive Regions that, as the name rightly implies, ignores certain areas of the trackpad to guard against spurious input from users.
In a screenshot, Apple describes the functionality as allowing users to “define regions of the trackpad where touches will be completely ignored.” The feature can be uncovered by pasting the following command into the Terminal app:
sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain && \ sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/Accessibility TrackpadInactiveRegionCustomization -dict Enabled -bool true
“When you touch ignored regions, the trackpad produces some of the strongest haptic feedback I’ve ever seen,” pdfu said.
As I write this, I haven’t run the command—which requires a restart of your Mac—but it’s sorely tempting. That said, this is a cool discovery because it’s a genuinely useful piece of kit. To name one example, my own cerebral palsy makes it such that I sometimes get uncontrollable tics in my hands and legs, even on my strongest, most dextrous side (left). As such, I’m constantly frustrated at the trackpad doing things unintentionally because I touched it, like right-clicking to invoke the contextual menu. Moreover, there’s a whole side of the Magic Trackpad I don’t use for the most part because of where my hand naturally gravitates. It would be great, then, to have the system ignore those areas of the accessory. It’s a clever way of accommodating people, yours truly very much included, with certain motor conditions.
Here’s hoping Apple officially enables this feature in a software update sooner than later.
