How to restore black keyboard shortcuts in menus

TidBITS Talk
1

Noticed recent system-wide change in menus that prevents me from discovering keyboard shortcuts. Is there a terminal command or app which undoes this?

Keyboard shortcuts are always shown in gray (matching the appearance of the dimmed commands not available for current app state). Notice gray commands in screenshot even for available menu items.

Dimmed
Dimmed552×1216 65.5 KB

Already tried without success:

Accessibility Display settings

  • High contrast on
  • Differentiate without color off.
  • Color filters: Grayscale off
  • Scaled and native resolutions at Prefs: Display

My set up:

  • Very old eyes
  • MacBook Air 2020 intel
  • Monterey 12.5.1
  • screen resolution scaled 1168x730 using BetterDisplay
2

Unfortunately, there isn’t a fix for this problem, it’s a deliberate choice made by Apple. I have higher contrast and disabled transparency set on my system (iMac 2017 27-inch, latest Monterey, screen resolution bumped down to 2048 x 1152) but unless Apple relents from this decision that’s as good as it’ll get right now.

3

Thanks for confirming the bad news. Seems like a poor choice, given Apple’s accessibility-forward marketing.

I’ve suggested they re-enable the legibility via

and

4

The free app Cheatsheet may be useful to you. It installs as a login item and causes a long press of the command key to display a list of the commands and shortcuts for the current foreground app.

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