MacOS in black and white: using accessibility features to enhance focus

MacOS contains a built-in feature to apply a gray scale filter to your monitor.

This post explain how I triple press the power button to toggle the gray filter on and off on my work laptop (Macbook).

I use it to enhance focus when reading documentation or writing, or simply when I need to nudge my brain into focus mode.

MacOS colour filter feature

The first step is to enable the gray scale colour filter.

Open the system settings and go to the accessibility tab. Near the bottom you will find the colours filter section.

Under the crayons, change the filter type to “Grayscale”.

Now you use the toggle “Colour filters” to enable or disable the colour filter.

I find that it is a very efficient way to get into a focus state for certain tasks, such as writing.

However, having to go open the system settings all the time is quite cumbersome and gets old very quickly.

When you want to promote a habit, you need to reduce the friction. I would not turn on the gray scale filter, simply because it’s out the way. If only I could reduce the friction, I would be more incline to use it.

After a bit of research, I found out there is a built-in way: the accessibility shortcut feature.

The Accessibility Shortcut trick

By pressing the touch id (i.e. the power button) three times on a Mac, you open the accessibility shortcuts menu.

It offers a quick access to accessibility features.

Some of those are very useful, I have used in the past when improving accessibility on web projects.

When there is only one “shortcut” active, we can skip the quick access menu. Triple pressing the power button will automatically enable that accessibility feature. Which is exactly what we want for the colours filter.

Knowing this, we can use it as way to toggle our gray scale filter on and off easily, from anywhere.

Back in the accessibility settings, scroll to the bottom and click “Shortcut”. This will open a page with the list of accessibility shortcuts available.

Un-select all the checkboxes, except “Colour filters”.

That’s it. Now when you triple click the power button, the only option is the “Colours filters” Triple press and we’re in black and white. Triple press again and the colours are back.

As it is the only available option, the OS is smart enough to skip the menu and simply toggle it on and off.

We often don’t need colours

This is a tool for those that are using Mac and interested in reducing distractions on their machines.

After discovering this shortcut, I found myself using gray scale more and more - especially when I’m reading documentation or doing research. It is becoming a trigger for getting into deeper, focus state.

The interesting part is that once you get start using gray scale, turning the colours back is quite jarring, sometimes even obnoxious.