Pixels of the Week – September 28, 2025

Pixels of the Week is my weekly-ish curated newsletter for designers, UX folks, devs, and anyone building accessible, inclusive, usable (and let’s be honest, awesome) digital products. I share interesting articles, tools, inspiration, and resources I found during the week. This is the archive version. If you’d rather get it straight in your inbox (plus be notified when I publish other articles), subscribe to my newsletter.

Now: what I’m currently up to

I’m putting the final touch to my slides for uxcon Vienna. I’ve ended up reworking one of my talk a lot, I hope it. will resonate with the audience. On the craft side, I just got myself a button badge machine. I think I’ll create a couple of fun badges for the conference as well, let’s see if I get time. I’ve posted a sneak peak of the new “AUDHD Chaos!” design on Bluesky, on Mastodon and on LinkedIn.

Most popular content this week

How Blind People Navigate the World, On and Offline (8min) Blind people use white canes and guide dogs to get around in the physical world. In the digital world, they use zoom, magnifiers, screen readers, and Braille displays. Many of those tools rely on the code underneath. So, bad markup, means, bad experience. A must-read, for anyone interested in accessibility, by Laura Wissiak

Interesting articles that caught my attention

Making Content Accessible for People with Limited English Proficiency (14min) great tips, based on Irina Morozova’s talk. Plan for accessible content and presentation early in design. Apply accessibility principles, which reduce cognitive load: use plain language, clear headings, no idioms or unexplained acronyms. Keep text short, structured. Think about designing with less noise and more intention.

Why accessibility might be AI’s biggest breakthrough (8min)  “Neurodiverse employees may be benefiting far more from chatbots than their neurotypical colleagues.” oh that is an interesting finding. But, also, not surprising. Instead of just boosting productivity, AI can help close some gaps that traditional accessibility tools don’t (yet) for neurodivergent people (ADHD, dyslexia, autism).

Unstructured Input in AI Apps Instead of Web Forms (4min) Most forms on the web are still a giant pain.  Luke Wroblewski  argues that, AgentDB connected to an AI model, users won’t have to twist ourselves into database-shaped boxes anymore. They could throw in text, images, audio, and let AI structure it. I wonder if this can work for anything though.

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

Adrift is a quiet space where doubts become paper boats and drift together across a shared sea.

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

The Amazing Art of the Video Game Marquee: a collection of vintage marquee (the sign above video games in arcade machines), for my retro gaming, pixel art, big font design lovers. By Dan Sinker.

Useful tools & resources

PoKéMaTcH fun procrastination for all the Pokemon lovers: Carlos Velasquez vibe coded a card matching game

Swiss Cheese Mono font: welcome to another episode of unreadable but very fun fonts. Let me introduce you to Swiss Cheese Mono. The perfect font, for people who tend to send “cheese” instead of “cheers” at the end of their emails.

Color Sort Therapy: a stress relief game, where you sort different hues (not very color-blind friendly, though, sorry). You can get it on iOS or get the game on Android

Tutorials

Understanding Focus Indicators for Web Accessibility (10min) a nice quick introduction to designing and testing AAA compliant focus indicators. Also check Taking a shot at the double focus ring problem using modern CSS (15min) by Eric Bailey for some more ideas on how to build a nice focus ring that works in many situations.

Responsive Typography in Figma Sites while I would not use Figma sites for production sites, the potential for prototyping is nice. So, good to know you can have responsive typography in those!

Baby Steps Accessibility – Color Contrast of Text a short tutorial, presenting different tools to test the color contrast of text in the browser, but also outside. by Dennis Deacon