Imagine for a moment that everyone around you was talking about the big news, but you couldn't get to that news. You couldn't read the article. Or see the video. Or hear the audio. You couldn't understand what the words meant.

This is the reality for many Americans.

• More than 28 percent of U.S. adults have a disability and half of U.S. adults have a chronic illness that may affect how they think, understand, see, or hear.

• The average reading level of American adults is 6th grade.

• 37 million Americans live at or below the poverty line.

These factors make accessing news difficult.

We have a solution. A news site where every news story is available in text, audio, video, sign language and more. And it's never behind a paywall.

It sounds complex but our focus is simple: making the news accessible and creating accessible jobs.

We are Equal Access Public Media (EAPM), a nonpartisan, nonprofit, national news corporation. We are building a variety of publications that produce news in multiple formats.

To do this, we use principles of universal design and inclusive, assistive technology. Then, we produce written news, audio news, and video news. We call it multimedia, multimodal news.

We also reimagined the newsroom itself. By offering jobs that could be worked from almost anywhere with flexible hours, we saw bigger opportunities for a stronger team. Also, by working in teams instead of as individuals, no single person is carrying the burden alone.

Everything we do is rooted in accessibility, from the news itself to how we think about a newsroom.

News is for everyone.

To find out more, please visit https://equalaccesspublicmedia.org.