Soundings Bows Out

The Trustees of the charity Soundings Audio reluctantly decided that it was time for the Soundings Magazine, and its associated on-line support services for the visual impairment sector, to call it a day. The free monthly audio publication, which was distributed across the United Kingdom and beyond to thousands of blind and partially-sighted people on cassette and via the Internet, closed at end of March 2008.

The magazine, which was first heard back in May 1989, was staffed by just a handful of volunteers – too few to effectively run the administrative side of the charity - and the lack of any regular funding for over two years proved too much for the organisation as it struggled to cover even its modest basic running costs, let alone the expansion that was necessary to meet increasing demand for its services.

Ironically, the Soundings magazine recently won an award for 'the best audio publication for blind and partially-sighted people' and the magazine's reach continued to expand right up until the end with cassette requests increasing and the number of Soundings web site hits growing substantially month on month.

The magazine's on-line listeners' discussion group, the Soundings Forum, also closed at the end of March.

Since 1995, a key part of the Soundings service was to supply everything they produced, via their web site, for other organisations and charities to use - including Insight Radio, local talking newspaper groups and hospital radio stations.

Infosound

Because of the apparent need for free and impartial visual-impairment-related audio material, a new charity, called Infosound, has been running since January 2008 to offer an on-line service of downloadable monthly bulletins of relevant information for blind and partially-sighted people at www.infosound.org.uk. Like Soundings, Infosound is an all-volunteer charity and it aims to reflect all practical aspects of living with sight loss in the UK.