In Defense of macOS Tahoe’s menu icons
Over the weekend, Stephen Hackett linked to a post by Steve Troughton-Smith on how to hide the menu icons in macOS Tahoe. The trick involves a Terminal command.
defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool NO
“It [the command] even preserves the couple of instances you do want icons, like for window zoom/resize,” Troughton-Smith said in his post on Mastodon.
The SF Symbols menu icons, a flourish new to Tahoe’s visual design alongside Liquid Glass, have been the subject of much consternation amongst Apple watchers, with most people who revile them describing them as a crime against user interface design. But I disagree with the Apple community’s consensus, at least to an extent.
As a person with severe visual disabilities, two things are true here in my opinion: (1) the little glyphs are unattractive and nonsensical in places, adding clutter to the already cramped menu real estate; and (2) on the flip side, it’s plausible the menu icons can make identifying options more accessible because the icons act as a pictorial element which augments the written text. For my use, I don’t mind the menu icons at all, but will concede, as Hackett suggests in his commentary, Apple ought to “roll this change back in macOS 27, or offer a proper setting to disable these icons for those of us who find them distracting.” An eminently reasonable compromise to ask of Apple.
Preference notwithstanding, the accessibility story deserves some spotlight. To me, the former Early Childhood Development major sees Tahoe’s menu icons as simply a more highfalutin implementation of the High-Scope philosophy. Without getting too deep into the weeds on the curriculum’s inner workings, the Cliff’s Notes version is High-Scope classrooms prioritize bimodal sensory integration while also promoting literacy. To wit, it’s beneficial for young children to not only see images of the materials available to them in a particular center area, it’s also a boon to have the written word of said material(s). At a high level, this concept is what I’d presume drove Apple’s UI designers to add the icons in the first place; better for people to have a picture which reinforces the text. Disability-wise, while you can make a cogent argument that the icons are too “busy” in terms of visual and cognitive needs for some, the salient point I’m making here is just that the reality is probably—likely, even—more nuanced than that. The fact most restaurant menus omit pictures in their dishes’ description is commonplace, I’ll grant you, but commonality doesn’t necessarily equate to accessibleness. In other words, the people who loathe Tahoe’s menu icons are clutching their proverbial pearls because they think it’s an aesthetic regression—the problem is, aesthetics don’t, or shouldn’t trump, accessibility. By the menu icons logic, showers shouldn’t have grab bars because they make them look shittier, god forbid.
Here’s my one and only gripe with Apple’s current implementation of menu icons. I use Hover Text on my Mac, and while it does include keyboard shortcuts in the enlarged “tooltip,” it does not include the much-maligned icons. It seems like a curious oversight, making the Hover Text experience feel inconsistent and half-baked. That’s a surefire feature enhancement I’d love to see announced for macOS 27 come early June.
