How to navigate DWP Blue Books or Law Volumes

DWP has a doc called How to navigate around the Law Volumes at http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/how2.pdf but the screenshots it shows no longer reflect the DWP webpages layout. Where has the helpful list in left hand margin of SIs gone, ie the consolidated legislation, not the as enacted ones? Is it on Gov.UK instead?

Still works for me here:

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/c-0031.pdf

Have you upgraded to a new version of Acrobat PDF reader?  This display options have been moved around a bit and it could be that yours is hiding the bookmarks list.

Thanks very much for the instant reply. From one anorak to another, I’ve discovered that this is fine in Internet Explorer but the left margin links don’t appear in Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

brilliant ... was just trying to get it it to work in firefox too ... cheers both

nb - maybe it’s going the same way as the claims e.service ..

‘The service does not work properly with Macs or other Unix-based systems even though you may be able to input information.

You are likely to have problems if you use Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9 and 10, Windows Vista or a smartphone…

There is also a high risk that if you use browsers not listed below, including Chrome, Safari or Firefox, the service will not display all the questions you need to answer. This is likely to prevent you from successfully completing or submitting the form.’

plus re accessibilty -

‘If you use Jaws or Supernova screen readers, we apologise for any problems you may experience. You may wish to claim in another way.

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/eservice/need.asp

Good grief, I thought you were joking until I followed that link.  Unbelievable

here’s PCPro’s take on it (with interesting comments)

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2013/04/30/the-government-website-that-doesnt-work-with-ie-chrome-firefox-safari-macs-or-smartphones/

What are other people doing to get around this problem? I’m lucky enough to have an old version of IE at work, but for how much longer? And at home I can no longer look at the blue vols at all, which is extremely frustrating.

Any tips/techy work arounds?

here’s a sneak preview of something we’ve been playing with ....

only includes some of the 2013 regs at the moment, but would be great to get your feedback on whether you think it would be useful for us to run with ....

basically you get a link to the latest consolidated version; a short summary of what the reg relates to; and also a link to the rightsnet news story when we’d published the original statutory instrument

(nb - bear in mind that this is just a test page and that if we develop it we’d want to include some navigation; make it look prettier etc)

here you go ... http://www.rightsnet.org.uk/toolkit/consolidated-legislation

let us know what you think here or, if you’d prefer to contact us offline, as always we’re at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

cheers - shawn

Just re: Robby and Will’s problems with Blue book with Firefox (rather than the broader accessibility and other problems with .gov) - this may be of use:-

Recently-ish (around v19) Firefox switched to using pdf.js (its own internal pdf viewer) as its default viewer for pdf docs - this was silently foisted on users as part of the update - very annoying.

Pdf.js doesn’t support the pdf bookmarks that the Blue Volumes rely on for navigation.

If you reinstate Adobe reader as the default viewer then you should find that you can navigate the Blue Books in Firefox as before.

Ways to do that are here:-

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-built-pdf-viewer-and-use-another-viewer

or

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/950988.

(and for Chrome see: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1060734?hl=en )

thanks to those who’ve contacted us by email re us developing our ‘consolidated regs’ idea ... do let us know too whether there’s anything extra you would like to see us do in that corner of the room ..

cheers - shawn

Huge thanks to Jon for that info! Shawn, I’ll get back to you in more detail but in general, yes this facility would be extremely useful.

cheers tony ... yes we’re checking with the DWP re their plans ....

Just got news below from DMA Leeds Publications Team.  To summarise, http://www.legislation.gov.uk will be starting to contain revised as well as “as issued” regs on an ongoing basis. In the past it only had social security regs in the “as issued” form, but now it’s going to be taking over from the Law Volumes at http://www.dwp.gov.uk/publications/specialist-guides/law-volumes/the-law-relating-to-social-security

News about social security legislation (The Law Volumes)
DMA Leeds is now working in partnership with The National Archives to provide a new way for you to access updated social security legislation.
The National Archives is a United Kingdom government department and an executive agency of the Ministry of Justice. They are the official government archive and one of their roles is to maintain revised versions of all legislation on the legislation.gov.uk website.
DMA Leeds has been responsible for a number of years for producing the Law relating to Social Security and the Law relating to Child Support and we do this by a series of regular amendment packages that we publish on our internal departmental intranet site and the external DWP website.
... National Archives have, up until now, been concentrating on getting primary legislation (Acts) onto their website and consolidating them with subsequent amendments and also publishing secondary legislation (S.I.’s Orders etc) in their original format.
... At the moment, social security legislation will continue to be issued on our site as it has been, but there will be a gradual transfer to The National Archives site over a period of time. As soon as we have some more information on the timescales for this we will put out a further note.
DMA Leeds, Publications Team July 2013

Excellent (?!) ..... cheers Robbie