Feeling scared...

Thank you all so much for your helpful replies. I have started reading the guide, and will start making notes from both the guide and how I am feeling/coping on a day to day basis.

@asdman, the idea of filling in electronically is a godsend as I have a lot of pain in my hands/thumbs so can't write for very long. However, i can only see the form in PDF and I can't add text to it. Any ideas how to overcome that?

Thanks again to all

Katie x

The dialog box says that you need to be using Acrobat Reader 8.1.2 or later.

The problem I have when testing the form is that I typed and filled one of the boxes expecting scrollbars to appear; instead the text just gets smaller.

Type a page of A4 into one of these boxes and Atos will need a microscope to read it!

ktandpete, it says you need to save it first. Don't really know why. But I just called it "ESA50" and saved it to My Documents. Then I closed down my browser, opened "ESA50" from My Documents, and it works perfectly. You sort of click on the blank boxes and they turn from pale blue to white and then you can type in them. I've got Acrobat Reader 9.

I've just checked about what Derek said and it's true that the text does get smaller and smaller once you've filled the boxes. So, if I get to the end of a box I'll just continue in the "Other information" section at the end and then use additional sheets if necessary, in order to stop the text becoming too small for ATOS to read. But I've not needed to do this so far as I can actually fit a lot more in each box than if I was writing by hand even when the text is full size.

The only problem I can see is that when you print it out on A4 it's actually bigger than the printed form so it won't fit into the pre-paid return envelope they've sent me, so I'll have to make sure I've got an A4 envelope to hand. And it means I'll have to pay for the postage, but it's worth it to me not to have to write by hand.

asdman wrote:

ktandpete, it says you need to save it first. Don't really know why. But I just called it "ESA50" and saved it to My Documents. Then I closed down my browser, opened "ESA50" from My Documents, and it works perfectly. You sort of click on the blank boxes and they turn from pale blue to white and then you can type in them. I've got Acrobat Reader 9.

I've just checked about what Derek said and it's true that the text does get smaller and smaller once you've filled the boxes. So, if I get to the end of a box I'll just continue in the "Other information" section at the end and then use additional sheets if necessary, in order to stop the text becoming too small for ATOS to read. But I've not needed to do this so far as I can actually fit a lot more in each box than if I was writing by hand even when the text is full size.

The only problem I can see is that when you print it out on A4 it's actually bigger than the printed form so it won't fit into the pre-paid return envelope they've sent me, so I'll have to make sure I've got an A4 envelope to hand. And it means I'll have to pay for the postage, but it's worth it to me not to have to write by hand.

rather than pay the postage just cut the front off the envelope they send and selotape it to the bigger envelope or just write out by hand the details on the envelope provided I did this a couple of times with no problems and by the time i have added all the medical reports its a heavy weight

I'm sure I am not the only one who wastes a lot of money on printer ink thanks to Atos/DWP.

Most printer drivers have a scalable print setting to reduce the size of the page, but that would of course involve cutting each page to size!

You can actually start typing in the form in your web browser but it has to be saved to your hard drive eventually so it's best to save it first and make sure you keep a backup copy to avoid losing any data.

I think I would prefer to simply tick the boxes add the bulk of the information on additional sheets as the boxes are still too small even with the smallest font.

Regards

Derek

Ahh fiddle, tried both links and either gat blank web page or the direct.gov web page where, if i click the link it brings up a blank web page...what am I doing wrong?????