12 Hidden iPhone Settings That Change How You Use Your Phone

7. Button Shapes and Differentiate Without Color - Enhance Interface Clarity

The Button Shapes and Differentiate Without Color options, located in Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size, address critical usability issues that affect millions of users while improving the interface experience for everyone. Button Shapes adds subtle outlines and backgrounds to interactive elements throughout iOS, making it immediately clear which text elements are tappable buttons versus static labels—a distinction that modern flat design often obscures. This seemingly simple change eliminates the guesswork involved in identifying interactive elements, reducing frustration and improving navigation efficiency across all apps and system interfaces. Differentiate Without Color ensures that information conveyed through color alone is also communicated through shapes, patterns, or text, making the interface fully accessible to colorblind users while providing additional visual cues for everyone. These settings prove particularly valuable in apps that rely heavily on color coding for functionality, such as calendar apps, data visualization tools, or games. The combination of both settings creates an interface that communicates functionality through multiple visual channels, reducing cognitive load and making interactions more predictable and efficient. Users often discover that these accessibility-focused changes actually improve their overall iPhone experience, making navigation faster and reducing the mental effort required to identify interactive elements. The settings work system-wide, affecting both Apple's built-in apps and third-party applications that follow proper accessibility guidelines.