Pixels of the Week – June 8, 2025

My curated weekly-ish online newsletter, where I share interesting articles, tools, and resources I found during the week. You can expect content about UX, design, user research, accessibility & tech, but also some processes, some inspiration, sometimes books, and a couple of videos and podcasts. Also, don’t forget to, subscribe to the newsletter to get notified, you will get the weekly links directly in your mailbox, and be notified when I publish other articles.

Now: what I’m currently up to

Next week, I’m the keynote speaker at UXLibs. I’ve prepared a whole new talk that I called Libraries for everyone: overcoming hidden barriers. I’ll be talking about how libraries are not always inclusive, especially for people with invisible disabilities. I’ve never been a keynote speaker before, so I’m a little bit stressed. I’ve also never spoken in front of librarians. But, I’m a giant book worm, libraries used to be my home as a student, so, this topic is really dear to my heart. It should go fine.

Most popular content this week

More on What Makes a Good Accessibility Designer (9min) Great accessibility designers go beyond compliance. You need to work with disabled people, understand code, and navigating complex systems with empathy. The work is political, emotional, and ongoing. It requires self-regulation, pragmatism, and persistence, and, honestly, it’s not easy every day. by David A. Kennedy

Interesting articles that caught my attention

the captcha paradox (8min) AI becomes better than humans at solving captchas. Proving you are, indeed, a human online grows harder. Projects like World and Humanity Protocol aim to verify humans privately. Ironically, we may soon end up in a situation where, agents will be welcome, since they do the task on behalf of the human. And, might need to prove we are a robot, or represented by one, instead.

Designing Through Uncertainty (10min) Uncertainty is scary, especially at the moment, with all the content about how AI will replace us. But, it’s also part of design, not a flaw. Embrace change, stay curious, act mindfully. You can use unpredictability as a tool for growth, insight, and creativity in your design process. By Elizabeth Alli

Design system annotations, part 1: How accessibility gets left out of components  and Design system annotations, part 2: Advanced methods of annotating components, 2 articles by Jan Maarten on how annotations in design help build more accessible components.

Learnings from the Trend of Democratizing UX Research: What AI Means for Researchers (5min) Qiwen Zhao argues that AI will accelerate the democratizing of UX Resarch. While this should, in theory, allow researchers to focus on more critical area (I’m super skeptical about this argument), it will also enhance the risks of poor quality research. To mitigate the potential future mess, we need clear discussions about roles and responsibilities between researchers, stakeholders and AI tools. And to have a risk framework: human research should focus on high risk and low problem understanding. We also need to train stakeholders on bias, ethics, and to implement some rules, for research quality check.

Curiosity cabinet: non-design/tech rabbit holes I enjoyed

Scientists Fermented Miso in Space and It Changed Its Flavor (5min). Space-fermented miso developed a darker color and a “nutty” and “roasted” flavor, likely due to higher temperatures and increased pyrazine levels. Love it.

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

Whimsical Animations I complain a lot about websites, not respecting my reduce motion preference. Here is a good example of one that does this nicely, and lets me know. There are still some animations, but it’s a gentle fade in. Kudos to Josh W Comeau. Also, looking forward to his new course!!

Useful tools & resources

Image Editor a Figma plugin for when you need to edit hue, saturation, and other parameters of an image, directly in Figma.

Great or Meh? Compare Job Opportunities a tool, that lets you compare, how impactful and fulfilling 2 job opportunities are, so that you can decide which one fits you best.

VERT.sh an online tool to convert audio, image, and video file, from 1 format to another

Tutorials

CSS Holographic Masks a really cool experiment by Christian Alder (via Stefan Judis’ newsletter) with a little tutorial by Robb Owen on how to make this happen. Love it!

Latest news in the industry

Apple unveils powerful accessibility features coming later this year  (10min) Apple is bringing some interesting new accessibility helping technologies, from labels to tell you which accessibility features app support, to magnifying glass for Mac, reader mode, a new braille experience, live caption on the watch. They’ll also bring the vehicle motion cues to mac, and that makes me curious, because it means being able to work in train without motion sickness, maybe?