EUR-Lex newsletter

• Read this newsletter in your language
• Accessibility upgrades
• New case file feature
• Our page on the Protocol on Ireland / Northern Ireland - new features
• Export and share expert search queries
• Advanced search - lawmaking procedures
• Experimental features - deep linking
• ‘Directory of case-law’ page
• Meaningful tab titles
• ‘News’ has become ‘Themes in focus’
• The Official Journal act by act is here

To see a machine translation of this newsletter in another EU language, go to the online version, click on the icon at the top of the page and choose your language.

The changes include the following.

‘Skip to main content’ link

• the ‘skip to main content’ link in the header is now working correctly

Tooltips

• tooltips in the timelines of the law-making procedures are keyboard accessible
• all tooltips on EUR-Lex are announced by screen readers

Buttons

• all buttons now have an accessible label
• accessibility of the keyword buttons in the ‘expert search query’ has been improved

Interaction with screen readers and other assistive technologies

• if a form field is filled in incorrectly, users of assistive technologies such as screen readers will be alerted to which field triggered the error
• error messages are announced to users of assistive technologies
• whenever users need to fill in a form field (e.g. in the search widgets), this will be announced by assistive technologies
• several code improvements have been made to make sure the website works better with assistive technologies
• decorative images are now correctly labelled so that they can be ignored by assistive technologies

Other accessibility changes

• smooth scrolling in documents is deactivated when you click on the table of contents
• keyboard navigation in the search results pages has been improved

It is available for the cases published in the Reports of cases.

To access this feature, navigate to the ‘Case file’ link on the left-hand side of a case page.

At the top of the ‘Case file’ page, a box with a blue background contains general information about the case:

• Case number
• Title of the case
• Name of the Court
• Status of the case (closed, in progress, Stayed, Discontinued)
• Link to relevant appeal case (where applicable)
• Link to other cases with the same case number

The central part of the page provides a timeline with the main steps of the case (case brought; proceedings; decision) and the related main documents (communication published in the Official Journal; order; opinion of the advocate general; judgment; etc.).

• A search box to access specific Protocol-related documents by year, number and type of document. The search will run only on this specific collection of documents.
• Notes relating to the applicability of rules under Annexes 1 to 5 of the Protocol which appear when you move the cursor over the titles of the sections in the ‘Navigation tree’ section.

This is an experimental feature that makes it possible to display links to other legal acts referred to in EUR-Lex documents.

To see the full classification scheme that was in place prior to the Lisbon Treaty, click on ‘Consult the classification scheme in place before the Lisbon Treaty (up to 2009)’.

This feature is useful if you open several tabs from EUR-Lex as it helps you navigate between them.

Example: the tab for ‘Regulation (EU) 2016/679 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data’ will read: Regulation 2016/679 - EN – gdpr – EUR-Lex.

The main current themes are visible in the left-hand menu. Older themes can be accessed by clicking the ‘show more themes’ button.

The ‘Latest developments on EUR-Lex’ section has been renamed ‘EUR-Lex developments’. It only includes information specific to the EUR-Lex website, for example upgrades with new features.

In this new production mode, the Official Journal is no longer a collation of acts with a table of contents. Instead, each act is published individually as an authentic Official Journal in PDF format.