Keyboard shortcut for Accessibility - Invert Colors stops working

I'm glad to report that the keyboard shortcut issue has [silently] been fixed as of macOS 10.15.4 (19E266). I have not had the issue since, on my Late-2012 Mac Mini nor my 2018 MacBook Pro.

I only wish I would have been notified that this was addressed since it was a reported bug, but it's fixed.

Understood - I was actually only adjusting screen capture shortcuts, not the ones to affect accessibility.

Unfortunately, the setting change I made id not resolve the issue. However, I do believe it may still relate to Night Shift, since the issue seems to occur only after some amount of time has passed between sitting back down at the keyboard. The issue here is that my 2012 Mac Mini has no GUI options to affect this, and the Color Filter within the Accessibility system preferences is not set.

Should I have set that value to 1 instead of 0? I'm going to try flipping it and see if that makes any difference.

In case it helps, I'm dumping all contents of com.apple.universalaccess, none of which has any sensitive content:

I've also not yet tried the safe boot option or disconnecting all other USB devices, so I will be working on those two in the following day or two.

Many thanks for helping me fully reveal and/or resolve this issue!

I can now confirm that this problem occurs in safe mode, under a fresh user account that only had the following customizations done prior to testing:

Keyboard shortcuts: Under Accessibility, checked the box to enable Zoom and confirmed that the box to Invert Colors was already checked

Hot corners: Upper left corner disables screen saver, upper right corner enables screen saver.

I let it sit overnight, and when I came back in this morning and tried the keyboard shortcut to invert colors, and the screen flashed (since there is no sound in safe mode).

I'd also like to point out that there are 2 other accessibility issues that occurred after upgrading to Catalina. I made a post about Zoom, since that is also behaving differently. I'll summarize here for completion sake:

1. If you have colors inverted and enable Zoom, the area around the cursor changes until you move the cursor. Then, the rest of the screen changes.
2. The mouse cursor's body inverts its color, making it harder to see when colors are inverted.

As stated, these did not occur in any prior macOS release to Catalina. I really need this fixed, as it is a huge inconvenience to my daily workflow and hard on my eyes (I have low vision and brightness gives me migraines.)

Thanks for the tips, I think we've conclusively identified that this is a bug that needs to be raised up the flagpole for fixing.

I have been working through this on my 2012 Mac Mini, which does not support NightShade due to its external display.

Using a second user account, I set up my screen saver, hot corners and keyboard shortcuts to match my production account. I then did some comparisons using defaults.

noticed in the 'com.apple.universalaccess' defaults that my upgrade to Catalina may have tripped it to be enabled anyway. To combat this, I issued the following command in Terminal:

$ defaults write com.apple.universalaccess lastNightShiftActive 0

I will let you know in a day or two if this resolved the issue. Thanks for the tip, I'll circle back if it proved successful.

Side note, the post I made right after making this one regarding the Zoom issue appears to either not have been accepted, or did not post properly. So, this is currently the only place now tracking these two Catalina related accessibility issues.

Update on this issue.

I have contacted Apple support and this has become a ticket in their system. I have gone through reinstalling the OS files from recovery mode, ensuring that the mac is not set to sleep even when the display does, and all the troubleshooting steps I've done in this post.

This is now confirmed to be happening on my Late 2012 Mac Mini as well as my 2018 MacBook Pro, both have had the exact same steps done on them to troubleshoot and reproduce the isue.

Apple engineers are now looking into the OS for a bug. About time! Hopefully this gets fixed in a subsequent patch or OS release, as that is what my service expert relayed would be the best case for this issue. Nevertheless, it has been recorded in official channels as a major complaint for low vision users that severely hinders our ability to use the OS effectively.

As an aside, I began an AppleScript to automate the un-check and re-check of the Invert Colors keyboard shortcut. I'm stuck at the point where I cannot get it to toggle the checkbox. So, I also passed this on to Apple with hopes that they can complete the rescript.

If they do, I will post the script source here as a workaround. Compile the script and and you have something you can quickly execute to execute the workaround and then invert the colors for ongoing use. This is the intent, anyway. Let's see what comes of the script kludge. :)