Branded USB Flash Drives Deliver The News
If you’re sighted you take reading the newspaper or your favourite magazines for granted but if you’re blind or partially sighted then it’s much more of a challenge! Being blind or partially sighted is hard enough but to lose your sight and then lose the pleasure of reading can be particularly hard for many people to take.
Fortunately, and thanks in the main to volunteer organisations, the blind and partially sighted are able to continue to enjoy their newspapers or magazines by virtue of a “Talking Newspaper”. A Talking Newspaper, as the name implies, is an audio recording of the newspaper(s), magazine or in some cases a summary of local affairs. The recordings are often made by volunteer readers and recorded onto a cassette tape, or CD that is then posted out to the reader. Occasionally the talking newspaper is emailed out as an audio file attachment.
A more recent innovation in the world of Talking Newspapers is the use of USB flash drives. These ubiquitous little devices are ideal for the storage of audio and media files, they are small enough to “pop in the post”, they’re easy to use and they are very easy to re-write the newspapers and magazines to over and over again.
Duplicating and preparing the “talking newspapers” before distribution is fast and easy with a USB flash drive and certainly significantly quicker than copying the recording onto a tape cassette.
Cassette tapes are losing their popularity because fewer people have cassette players these days and the tapes themselves are prone to failure/damage.
Whilst there are only a small number of talking newspapers using USB flash drives at the moment the positive feedback from the newspapers and its “readers” suggest that it’s a format that is popular and as such is likely to see much greater use in the near future.
If you are a volunteer organisation that produces Talking Newspapers and you’re interested in using USB flash drives then give the team at USB2U a call and they’ll take you through the options and prices.