Volunteers who have read local stories to the blind for three decades say they are “desperate” to reach more people cut off from the news.

Every week, the Radlett, Elstree, Borehamwood and Shenley Talking Newspaper team records and sends out 60 cassette tapes of news and features to blind or partially sighted people.

This week the group’s chairman, David Clout, said there were many people in the area he wished knew about the service.

He said: “We are desperate for more listeners. There must be more people out there who are blind or partially sighted and have no access to the local news.

“We are urging sighted people to tell anyone they know who has problems reading their local newspaper about us.”

Stories ranging from elections and school events to thefts and sacred cows, taken from newspapers including the Watford Observer, are printed out every week by a team of editors and recorded onto the tapes by 56 readers and engineers in the Radlett Village Institute.

Master tapes are run through a high speed tape recorder, copies are sent out in yellow envelopes and households throughout the country receive 60 minutes of local news and features for free.

Mr Clout said: “We concentrate on local stories as that is something people will not be able to get from the radio. Occasionally there is not enough local news to fill the tape so we put in some national stories but people tend to complain when we do that. “Everyone wants to know what is going on, whether it’s a fire in Radlett or a murder.”

He added: “If someone has moved away from the area we still send out the tapes to them. At one point we were sending a tape all the way to Scotland and we have one person in Portsmouth. That way the local news makes it all over the country.”

After sending out around 1,500 weeks of tapes, the Talking Newspaper is hoping to move into the future and change the format the news is sent in.

Mr Clout said: “At the moment we’re stuck in the past with tapes. We were going to move to CDs but now have been told they’re old hat so we are going to use memory sticks.”

For more information, or to volunteer as an editor or reader, telephone David Clout on 01923 854 403 or Don Scott on 01923 856 935.