What does this mean?

In tabletop gaming, sidebars are as plentiful as advice about being a Game Master/Dungeon Master, or flame wars about class / subclass changes.

Sidebars, however, by DEFAULT, do not get parsed by screen reader software at all. All your slick design efforts, callouts to specific character subclasses, trivia: simply not parsed. Skipped over completely. Or worse, sidebar information shoved into the last sections of the document’s structure, with no context, no heading, no way to orient the player or game master as to what is going on or how this information is relevant.

What can you do about this?

You have some options. Use the Table of Contents to navigate this, we’re going to get a bit technical.

Community content note

If you are using a community content program, such as D&D’s Dungeoncraft program, you may have to use a template already cleared by the licensor’s legal team. In the case of Dungeoncrafts, you CAN make what you can more accessible; remember, you can always IMPROVE accessibility even if there are certain things you cannot yet do.

Does it need to be a sidebar?

The best place to start is by thinking through reading order. Reading order is not necessarily the same as visual order: sidebars are usually on the same page as the relevant information, so it’s useful to ask yourself why THIS information is in a sidebar. Can it be its own paragraph? Could it be part of the main text but in lower hierarchy – for example, set off by a heading-4 (fourth-level heading) or some other way of marking this (D&D house style for Dungeoncrafts might suggest using italicized bold text as leading text in this case), and not a sidebar?

I recommend for accessibility reasons just double-checking if your sidebar has to be a sidebar at all, or if it could simply be a paragraph or a smaller section.

If it absolutely must be a sidebar, use this exercise to keep track of where you want the sidebar associated. This will help you in the design and in the PDF steps.

Design steps: where does the sidebar belong?

If you are using software like Adobe InDesign or Affinity: remember that if you use a sidebar, the sidebar might not be associated structurally with the content visually near it.

Ask yourself: does the information in that sidebar still make sense?

Using tools like InDesign’s Articles pane may also help check and ensure reading order, if you have access to them.

PDF steps: if you have Adobe Acrobat CC/Pro

Unfortunately, looking at the PDF structural tag tree requires Adobe Acrobat CC. I hear that FoxitPDF may also allow this.

If you have access to Adobe Creative Cloud – specifically, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Acrobat CC/Pro – you can start by using the automated checkers for PDF. This includes automated tagging, which is Adobe’s way to say “let’s guess at this structure the best we can”. Sometimes the automated tagging gets the structural tags and reading order incorrect, so it’s worth checking the tags. You can read more about Adobe’s tag tree at this helpful article “Understanding the Tags Tree and Tags Panel” via Illinois State University.

Conclusion

This sounds complicated, but if you build it into your process – even in the manuscript stage, of making sure sidebars are not barriers, if the information should better be placed somewhere else – it becomes so much easier!