On January 1970

the first Talking Newspaper was born. Tape cassettes dropped through the letterboxes of twenty blind people in various districts in Cardiganshire. The idea caught on and, slowly but surely, Talking Newspapers began to spring up in other parts of the country. By 1974, there were sufficient to warrant the formation of a national membership body, the Talking Newspaper Association of the United Kingdom (TNAUK). The objectives were to unite and serve the growing number of active local Talking Newspapers and to stimulate their creation to reach every blind reader in the four nations who wanted to keep in touch with the local community.

The reach of talking newspapers

was extended in August 1983 with the advent of the National Service, based in Heathfield, East Sussex. From modest beginnings, with just the Sunday papers being recorded in a small room above the Oxfam Shop in Heathfield High Street, the service gradually expanded to the substantial operation it is today, whereby eight studios, fifty staff, 230 volunteers and a battery of high-speed copiers enable over 230 publications to be recorded onto tape, creating an output of around 2,000,000 cassettes per annum. Recent years have also seen the development of the national electronic service which has enabled TNAUK to transcribe complete publications into formats accessible by visually-impaired people through computers equipped with screenreaders, voice synthesizers and/or text magnifiers. This has greatly speeded up delivery times with the result that there are now a number of blind and partially-sighted individuals who receive and browse their daily newspapers more quickly than sighted readers!

In 2004

the decision was taken to restructure TNAUK. It was agreed that the membership association role should be handed over to a newly-formed organisation, the Talking News Federation, leaving the original charity free to concentrate entirely on running the National Service and its commercial subsidiary, SoundTalking. This separation took place on March 31, 2005 and TNAUK stood ready to enhance its unique position as national newsagent for the partially sighted section of the population and others for whom the printed word is not a convenient or easily-accessible medium.