Pixels: cool dice with applications in accessibility

During GenCon, I met with folks from Pixels, a company that makes light up dice… and that sort of fell into becoming an accessibility aid at the gaming table. They did this by listening to the community when folks brought up the benefits of using these dice for individuals with visual impairment or to help with player engagement at the table in various ways.

From there, they embraced the accessibilty side and began sending test kits for people to try out and research and give feedback on so they could improve the customizability of the dice during development in a direction that would benefit everyone, but particularly for those who needed it as a gaming aid.

Lights mean high contrast and color coding

The most obvious thing about Pixels is that they light up, which is really cool in and of itself. It’s basically taking the shiny click clacks and making them even shinier.

a photo of a d20 showing a 2 and lit up yellow and a d6 showing a 2 and lit up red

What this also means is that you can have a really high contrast, light up readout, which can help some folks who have visual impairment to be able to read the roll when they might not typically be able to.

In addition, you can use the app that comes with the dice to adjust the colors, allowing you to color code rolls for associating with different numbers or demonstrate pass/fail conditions for helping new players learn the game, assist with number recognition, and more.

a screenshot of the Pixels app showing the light up programing for different rolls.
Rolling a 6 means it will flash rainbow colors
Rolling a 5 means it will flash blue
Rolling a 4 means it will flash a custom color (which is greent)
Rolling a 3 means it will flash a custom color (which is yellow)

Roll to speech

With the app, you can also turn on the speech feature which will read your roll to you from your phone. So, if you roll a 15, your die would light up to the color you assigned for 15 AND your phone would say “fifteen”. You can hear the roll instead of needing to see it.

a screenshot of the Pixels app showing the speach settings for various rolls.
For a 19, it will say nineteen
For an 18, it will say eighteen
and so on

Custom sounds

And… you can customize the sounds!

It’s possible to upload sound clips that you’ve either found or made yourself and assign them to certain rolls in addition to, or in place of, the roll to speech read out.

a photo of a d20 showing a 20 and lit up in rainbow and a d6 showing a 5 and lit up in blue

Right now, our d20 is programmed to say “BIG BADDA BOOM!” when we get a nat20 and to play the sad trombone sound on a nat1… which makes rolling low fun! We had to pause our last game for a minute because kiddo was laughing so hard at the nat1 roll… which definitely took the initial sting out of the PC “accidentally” crashing his airship (this was expressly requested by kiddo to be very dramatic once the giggle fits were over).

a screenshot of the Pixels app showing the custom sound clips page
rolling a 20 results in playing "bbb" which stands for BIG BADDA BOOM
rolling a 1 results in playing "sad trombone"

Including customizable sound allows you to also program it for saying pass-fail and yes-no-maybe instead of the numbers. You can convert your dice to custom dice (i.e. if you have a game that uses a d6 with all 1’s and 2’s only, you can program your dice to speak “one” or “two” even if the numbers on the faces don’t match).

Then there’s kiddo’s favorite, which is adding random words and sounds and just rolling for fun. We rolled for the laughs here because it was just fun and silly thing to do with kiddo, but I could also see these being the base for a fun ad lib game, practicing speech for different words, calling on a random player, etc.

Multiple profiles

a photo of a d6 showing a 3 and lit up in yellow

Each set of lights and sounds can also be saved as it’s profile so you can switch between them during the game.

This means you can use profile #1 for rolling your regular numbers on your d6 then switch to profile #2 to have the same d6 switch over to calling out a player name to have them add a random detail to the enviroment… or you could have a separate profile for each character that lights up with a different color.

Overall thoughts

Everything with Pixels was pretty easy to use, and we’ve really enjoyed getting to mess around with all the features in the app before even playing a game. For running a TTRPG, these have been great for helping with engagment, and I appreciate that the company has put an effort into making their product more accessibility focused, even if that wasn’t their original plan.

Listening to community feedback is a kind of double win by both providing good market data for new opportunities for the company AND being a catalyst for creating more resources for everyone. I’m glad to see that it was taken to heart.

Where to find Pixels

Currently, Pixels is still fulfilling their crowdfunding campaign, so they are prioritizing backer fulfillment BUT there are a limited number of d20’s available on their site, and there’s more to come (in d20’s and other dice sizes) soon. They’re also working on further accessibility improvements via the app.

Keep an eye on their website for updates and ordering info!