About

The Henley and District Talking Newspaper is an organisation run by volunteers to provide an invaluable service, mainly to visually impaired people.

Some 50 volunteers work on a rota basis throughout the year so that people, who are unable to read the newspaper for themselves, receive an audio recording of The Henley Standard through their letter box each week.

Although the work is done by amateurs, every effort is made to achieve the best possible result for the listener. Early editions of the newspaper are collected from the Henley Standard office on a Thursday each week and that evening a group of four readers and a technical controller produce a recording of about an hour in length. We are aware that not all listeners live in the town itself, so news is included from the surrounding villages each week. We also try to include, 'Letters to the Editor', ‘The Diary Page’, family announcements and ‘Thought for the Week’. Other than these items, each reader chooses news articles which we hope are of general interest to the listener. The recording is then copied onto memory sticks and posted out to the listeners in a protective wallet and usually received on the Saturday morning. Once the weeks news has been listened to, the listener reverses the address label in the wallet and posts it back to us. There is no need to add any stamps because The Post Office operates a freepost service for registered blind and partially sighted people. A machine for listening to the recordings can be provided free of charge.

This service is free of charge to the listener and our running costs are covered by donations we gratefully receive and fundraising.

History

The association was founded in 1982 with sponsorship from the Lions Club of Henley on Thames and with support of other organisations in the town. The initiative came from Arthur Hull, who as then President of the Lions Club, brought his energy and enthusiasm to the formative years as the first Chairman of Henley and District Talking Newspaper Association until his death in 1987. From a group of readers around a single microphone in Arthur's living room sending the first cassette tapes to about twenty blind people, the Talking Newspaper has developed rapidly and has grown over the last forty years.