I usually don’t make blog posts on my own site anymore, but I’m breaking that pattern for some good news.
If you play Dungeons and Dragons Adventurers League – i.e., the organized play side of the house – there’s more about accessibility in the newest Dungeoncraft guidance.
The Context
D&D has a community content program called Dungeoncrafts. The idea is, if someone uses the (Hasbro-legal-department-approved) Dungeoncraft guidance and template, there’s no need to pass it to the organized play administrators or Wizards of the Coast for approval. You have to follow the guidance, including what rewards and locations you can use, and what levels of play, however. Historically, this has meant that any nods to accessibility of an adventure in the digital accessibility sense has been limited. If you compare the Dungeoncraft guidance documents over time, you may see a sentence that designers can have a separate file, but the template MUST be used for it to be considered a valid Dungeoncraft.
Further context: The tabletop industry is still heavily visual and reliant on PDFs, but the tabletop gaming industry is multigenerational. Dungeons and Dragons specifically is celebrating their 50th anniversary and onwards. Other game franchises have been around since the 1980s or 1990s – from Traveler to GURPS to Vampire the Masquerade – and of course, relatively newer systems like Pathfinder and Powered by the Apocalypse. Plenty of people with disabilities, neurodivergent conditions, past injuries, and conditions just due to age (young or old!) play tabletop games. The tabletop communities historically have extremely low margins, and with the current US economic situation, sometimes paying for Adobe Creative Cloud to do accessibility remediation in Acrobat or InDesign is simply not viable (check Note 1). BUT there are accessibility improvements that can be done at the manuscript stage, often using features like internal bookmarks, alt text, or even just using the style ribbon in word processors to make sure that headings are in the correct structural hierarchy.
The Changes
In the most recent Dungeoncraft guidance at time of this writing – the D&D Adventurers League Dungeoncraft Design Guide v 1.8 of May 2025 – there is an additional note about accessibility of adventures:
“Accessibility. You may create accessible versions in your upload. The template must be one of your downloads, adjusted to use tags, bookmarks, alt text, and accessibility improvements that don’t change anything about the appearance. Additionally, you may create a version that does not use the template, using fonts, sizing, formatting, and layout as advised by accessibility experts.”
This expanded guidance does not seem like much in the document, compared to the changelog of items and rewards and valid sourcebooks to use when designing. BUT it is a substantial improvement over previous guidance, when a creator/designer had to functionally provide another version that did not use a template, and a version using the template still had to be included.
Is it perfect, no. There are plenty of times in accessibility where Legal or Product punts accessibility improvements down the line, and my personal impression is that the template was approved by Legal (somewhere: again, my guess) and now there’s tension between an already-approved template and needs of players. Again, historically, accessibility has NOT been a priority – and document accessibility often still is the realm of governmental offices and there’s a lot of tension even in those cases (check Note 2). All of this compounds.
But it’s still great to see.
Notes
Note 1: Adobe has PDF accessibility checkers etc but it’s only in Creative Cloud subscriptions/DC versions. The only other PDF remediation I know of at this time is available in FoxitPDF, so the commonly suggested alternative to design software within the tabletop community – that being the Affinity suite of products – would not help with these cases.
Note 2: I’m in the US. Accessibility of information and computer technologies (software, documents, etc) is mandated in the US Code for federal agencies (Section 508) and as part of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and there are international standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but recently it’s come under heightened scrutiny from the administration in addition to many ongoing stereotypes about “we know who uses this” or “people with disabilities don’t do (whatever)” mythunderstadings. That’s a lot more context and politics I’m willing to go into here, though; if you want more of a background, go to Reddit or LinkedIn accessibility groups.
Resources
D&D Dungeoncraft guidance can be found most easily on the official D&D Discord.
If you want more resources on accessibility, there’s a resource list here on this site!
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