The Colchester and District Talking Newspaper was one of the first in the country to start. What actually provided the incentive, apart from the desire to support blind people, was to creation by scientists at the University of Essex of the equipment which would copy cassette tapes at high speed. Experts from the Department of Language and Linguistics and from the Department of Electronic Engineering met together and discovered that tape recordings of local newspapers were being made on reel to reel tapes elsewhere in the country.
It was not long before a fund raising excercise involving the Students Union, the Colchester based King Coels Kittens and local Lions clubs provided the means by which a studio could be arranged at the university and volunteers from the university and the local community joined together to create the first Colchester Talking Newspaper on cassette tape on 22 JULY 1973.
From that time, when in total there were only about 10 Talking Newspapers in the country, to just a couple of years later over 500 similar organisations were created including the national service, known as the Talking Newspaper Association of the United Kingdom (TNAUK).