A talking newspaper giving highlights of the local news to the blind and partially sighted is about to celebrate its 21st birthday.

The first edition of the Pendle Voice went out in 1975 and had three listeners. Since then the news cassette's audience has grown to 300.

The audio paper is put together by a team of volunteers who record selections from the local papers and duplicate the master tape onto cassettes which are despatched throughout the area.

As the Pendle Voice developed it added regional and national titles to its local coverage as well as popular magazines.

Most of the news tapes provide three hours of listening and are sent around the UK through the group's link with the Talking Newspaper Association of the United Kingdom.

In its early days all the equipment fitted snugly into a cupboard at Nelson and Colne College but for the the last 15 years its home has been in a terrace house in Smith Street, Nelson.

Now Pendle Voice has its own tape library and recently introduced a computerised bar-coding system to streamline sending out the tapes.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.