Only two browser plug-ins are required to view the Royal Mail site: Flash for multimedia content and  Acrobat for PDF documents.

We have purposely limited the plug-ins so that we can make the content for them as accessible and usable as possible for all users. If one of our agencies propose that we use a new technology that requires our users to have another plug-in, they first have to show that most people already have it and that the content can be made accessible.

Adobe have been working very hard to ensure that recent versions of Flash are accessible. Nowadays objects in Flash can be given text alternatives, just like alt texts, for images on regular web pages. It has also become easier to mark up the reading order so that movies make sense to screen readers. Finally objects that don’t add to the experience can be made silent so that they don’t distract. All these improvements benefit disabled customers, particularly screen reader users.

It’s been a struggle to find ways of making use of the new accessibility features and find developers who had experience of coding accessible Flash. But we think that our recent Flash movies, e.g. explaining the new format-based pricing, are accessible to all customers.

Newer versions of the Flash player allow you to take full advantage of all Flash accessibility features. If you are disabled, we particularly encourage you to upgrade to the latest version. Anything older than version 7 will not give you the full experience.

Download the latest Flash player from Adobe

The Royal Mail site contains a large number of links to PDFs readable with Adobe Acrobat Reader. Unfortunately most of them are not accessible. We are working on changing that but it’s taking time longer than we’d like.

Unlike Flash, creating PDF documents is very easy. Once a document has been created, it can seem like a good idea to put it up on the web, even if it was created for print. But print PDFs don’t have any of the accessibility features that PDFs created specifically for the web should have. So you see how we ended up in this situation.

According to UK legal praxis, all information in PDFs also has to be available in normal web pages.

Download Adobe Acrobat Reader
Download Foxit Reader (Windows only)