Screen readers are used by people who are blind or nearly blind. Listening to the web is a very different experience from looking at it as it becomes a stream of words. Screen reader users also don’t use a mouse to navigate, instead they use only the keyboard.

At Royal Mail we try to smooth the way for screen reader users. This includes making sure images can be “heard” as well as making it easy to fill in our online forms. We test new pages to make sure they’re easy to use for screen reader users. If you surf the net with a screen reader and have problems using our site, please report it to us so we can do something about it.

This page describes the efforts we make to help screen reader users on royalmail.com.

Sometimes we use Macromedia Flash to demonstrate our products. We make the Flash movies accessible so that screen reader users can read and interact with them-just like sighted users. In addition we make sure the same information is available in plain text.

An example is the Flash demonstration of the format-based pricing of mail. Your screen reader will read the text in the movie and you can use the TAB key to navigate between the links. In the image, the link “Large Letter” has been selected that way. That’s why it has a yellow border. If you prefer, you can let your screen reader read a normal web page with the same information instead. There is always a link to the page under the Flash movie.

You can read more technical information about Flash on the plug-ins page.

There are many links to PDF documents with important information on our site. We are working to make sure that all PDFs make sense when read by a screen reader and that we have the same information available in plain text.

You can read more technical information about PDFs on the plug-ins page.

Pop-ups and new windows can be very disorienting when you listen to a page. But some times they are helpful because your can quickly read something, close the window, and know that you are still on the same page. One example of this is in our online shop. When you enter your credit card details, there is a link to a pop-up that explains what a credit card security number is.

We try to only use pop-ups and new windows under very specific circumstances and to let you know that a link will launch in a new window before you click on it.

Some times information is easier to understand when it’s in a table. Postage by weight is an obvious example on the royalmail.com site. For tables we always mark up the structure so that your screen reader can tell the headings from the normal table cells and tell you which headers belong to a specific cell. Sighted people will notice that the headers have grey backgrounds. In the code each header is associated with the column under it.

Historically, HTML tables were used to place the content on web pages in an invisible grid. But over the last few years more and more sites have turned to a better technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) instead. In CSS you can code your web page in an order that makes sense to screen reader users but  will be shown on the screens of sighted users in a way that makes sense to them.

Royalmail.com uses CSS for layout in all new development.

Online forms mean more independence for people with vision impairments. Online forms are easy to fill in for people who use a screen reader. Paper forms on the other hand often mean relying on a person with better vision for help. So, the more services we can make available online, the more we support our disabled customers’ independence.

Programming forms that are easy to fill out for screen reader users is straightforward. We just make sure that:

• the structure of the form with fields and labels is marked up
• you can use the TAB key to reach all fields and buttons
• the ENTER key sends off the form
• any error messages are before the field that has a problem

These simple measures also help people with other disabilities or no disability at all.

JavaScript has always been a problem for screen reader users. The problem is that screen readers cannot “see” that something new appears on the page. They can only read what is in the code when the page is shown. If, for example, error messages appear after the page has been read, there is no way for the screen reader to know about it. The person in front of the PC is left wondering why nothing is happening.

With the recent popularity of Ajax, the JavaScript problem has increased. At royalmail.com we have so far avoided using Ajax for that reason. We will only use client-side technology, like JavaScript and Ajax, if we can be sure that it will work for screen reader users too. Currently we are investigating accessible JavaScript use. But so far we use JavaScript only for cosmetic things, like lighting up a button when you mouse over it.