While the digital world offers an abundance of online news sources, accessibility is still a work-in-progress far too often. It is commonplace to spend more time navigating to content than reading that content when using screen reading technology. Poor heading structure, Ads lacking accessibility that are mixed in with the news story, multimedia that plays silently and grabs focus and much more take away from the reading experience.
A public library card and a resource known as U.S. Newsstream offered by many libraries is one solution to include in your reading toolkit to assist.
ProQuest’s U.S. Newsstream is a gateway to an improved reading experience. The full text of hundreds of publications is available and the helpful thing is that through a URL for each publication, you can easily access a specific issue of a newspaper or other resource with a very screen reader-friendly view of all the article headlines. In addition, when full text is available, you can read the article free of ads or other distractions mixed in with the news.
To use this method of accessing content requires a few preparation steps. First, you need to have a library card for a library that subscribes to this service, and you will need to know your library barcode.
Second, and this is critical, you need to sign into the service through your library’s access point. You can typically find this on your library’s home page under an area called subscription databases, online resources or some other link pointing to the various databases available from your library.
For example, my local library is the Madison Public Library and their list of resources is available under the eResources link.
Following the U.S. Newsstream, link you are prompted to provide library information. Typically this involves some variation of providing your library barcode and at times indicating your library. Again, it is vital you start with this path before going to the next step.
Once you are authenticated to U.S. Newsstream, you can search and use the database directly. However, what has worked well for me is accessing publications directly.
U.S. Newsstream has a list of all their publications you can download. I took the liberty of downloading the file and turning it into a table within Excel and using Excel’s First Column feature to make the file fairly screen reader friendly and available to use.
To access a publication, open the file I’ve created and locate the publication you want to read. Titles are in the first column.
Next, locate the URL for the publication. Hint, with focus in the cell containing the title, press CTRL+Right Arrow and you will jump to the last column in the table row which contains the URL. Press CTRL+C to copy the URL and return to your web browser.
Move focus to the address bar in whatever browser you are using and paste the URL you copied and press Enter. This will take you to the publication page for the resource of interest. Combo boxes allow you to select the year and date for an issue of the publication and a Show Issue Content button brings up the content from that publication for the chosen day.
Article headlines are marked up as headings and links. Pressing enter will load the article.
The article content, when the publication has full text, starts under a heading aptly named full text. At this point you can simply start reading the article. Use whatever method you prefer to navigate back to the list of articles for the publication when finished reading.
As mentioned earlier, it is key that you are signed into the general U.S. Newsstream service before accessing the URL for the publication. If you are not, the URL will not work as described. You will be told to sign in through a library but without options for doing so directly.
The Excel file listing publications has multiple columns of information. These include items such as the dates for which content is available, gaps in coverage, and more.
U.S. Newsstream, other ProQuest databases and resources from your library offer much more functionality and information than outlined here. This is just a starting point.
Finally, I am a firm supporter of a robust and independent news media. Even though I access many articles in the way I’ve outlined here, I do also support publications through subscriptions, donations or other financial contributions. I urge anyone who is able to do so to do the same. Those working in the media have the same bills and needs in life as we all do, and we’ve already seen dramatic losses in meaningful careers in the profession.
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