As I read online, I bookmark resources I find interesting and useful. I share these links about once a month here on my blog. This post includes links related to accessible color, AI images, AI video, working with AI, the environmental impact of AI, and tools for instructional designers.
Accessible color
Accessible Color Choices Are About So Much More Than Just Contrast – Sheri Byrne-Haber’s Blog
This article is a deep dive into accessible color choices for potential issues such as high contrast repeating stripes causing migraines or saturated red triggering seizures. This includes a list of color issues not regulated by standards but that may still cause problems (such as cultural differences in colors). h/t Kayleen Holt
This contrast checker uses a different calculation than the standard WCAG color contrast checker. It recognizes a difference between light text on a dark background and dark text on a light background. Sometimes color pairs that meet the WCAG can still be hard or tiring to read, and this calculator may be especially useful for those pairs.
A Deep Dive into Contrast Themes | Digital Accessibility Services
Contrast Themes are an accessibility feature in Windows that overrides the default colors used to provide custom choices for better accessibility. This is beyond doing a light and dark theme, but a way for the user to adapt the app or website in a way that works for them. This article gives specific tips for better compatibility with Contrast Themes. For example, if the focus state would change background color but not outline, using a transparent outline instead of outline: none lets the Contrast Theme provide an outline in a user-selected color.
AI images
Welcome to Magic: The Editor – by Humble Nations
Midjourney’s new editor is now available. You can prompt for edits with natural language, more like prompting edits in Nano Banana. This article includes a bunch of examples of editing prompts for changing the style of images, plus a few others like changing camera angle, character pose, and prompting layouts from sketches.
A collection of hundreds of examples of images and prompts created with ChatGPT. Filter the list by category and style. The examples are sometimes uneven in quality; some of these have that very obviously ChatGPT look to them. But there are some creative ideas too, and it’s helpful to see examples of prompts to see how to describe different visual styles and elements.
Why A.I. Struggles with Negative Words | Otherwords
If you’ve ever tried to generate an image with AI and asked for “no plants” in the office, only to get a bunch of plants in the image, you’ve seen how much trouble AI has with negative language. This video explains why negative words are hard for AI to understand.
Real or AI? – Test Your AI Image Detection Skills
Can you identify which images are real and which ones are AI? I did terribly on this quiz the first time I tried: less than 50% right.
AI video
SLICE: how we made a 2-minute AI short film with Seedance 2.5
This is a great example of a “show your work” post on what it takes to generate high-quality AI videos. The prompts to create the characters and scene and to generate the video clips are included. The amount of detail needed to prompt in Seedance is significant; the prompt for the first 30-second clip is 700 words long. Check the notes at the end about what failed and how he worked around the problems too.
Remove Text from Video Online – AI Video Text Remover
I’ve never personally had a need to do this, but I can see how this tool might be useful. If you have a video with burned in “open” captions, this AI video editing tool says it can remove the text. The pricing options include buying a credit pack, so if you only have an occasional need for this you can buy credits instead of adding yet another monthly subscription.
Working with AI
The AI Workflow Redesign Method: How the Top 6% of Users Get Real Returns from AI
Dr. Philippa Hardman explains her process for analyzing a workflow to determine how to redesign it to get more value out of AI.
Psychological Stamina and other #NerdStuff – Usable Learning
Julie Dirksen explains the concept of psychological stamina. Even if you have the knowledge and skills to do a certain task, how long can you keep doing it? If the behavior requires vigilance over time, like watching for hazards on the road while driving, how long can you maintain that level of mental focus?
Diligence for reviewing outputs is a key element for successful use of AI (as I may have mentioned a few times before).
—Julie Dirksen
AI environmental impact
AI vs. Streaming: Energy, Water and Hidden Costs
Josh Penzell created a calculator to help people compare the energy, water, and other environmental costs of using AI in comparison to streaming. One insight I had from this tool is that AI uses a lot more direct on-site water. That’s probably where some of the really high numbers of AI water use come from. But when you look at the total operational water including the electricity use, then streaming uses more water than AI. All of the source data is provided so you can dig into it yourself.
Tools for instructional designers
The ID Toolbox: free tools for instructional designers
A collection of free utility tools for instructional designers. I will definitely use the Caption Line Splitter, which rewraps captions based on the number of characters and lines. The collection includes other utilities for accessibility, QA, calculating development time, identifying which text will overflow when localized, and more.
Additional curated resources
Check out my complete library of links or my previous bookmarks posts.
New Hands-On AI Image Workshop
Want to learn how to generate higher quality AI images—visuals that are good enough to actually use in a course? Part of the trick with AI image generation is that even if you start with a good prompt, you still may need to iterate a few times to refine it. Even though I’ve presented on AI images multiple times, it’s impossible for me to give participants enough time to really practice that iteration process in a one-hour webinar.
That’s why I built a new three-hour hands-on AI image workshop. You get six rounds of live practice. After each round, we review your results so we can figure out how to improve them. I’ll give you a reusable prompt framework as a starting point, and then we’ll work on iterating and improving images, using reference images for consistency, and matching brand colors. This is geared for L&D professionals, so I focus on the kinds of images commonly used in training like photorealistic examples and icons. You’ll leave with a small set of images for a real project of your choice, ready to use in a course.
The post Accessible Color, AI Images and Video: ID Links 9/29/26 appeared first on Experiencing Elearning.
