About.

How this started

A small studio in North Yorkshire builds and looks after the website for a talking newspaper — recordings made for blind and partially sighted listeners, put together into an edition every month.

Two things became obvious after a while.

The people recording were mostly older. The people making the most interesting audio — drama, poetry, music, proper storytelling — were mostly young, and had nowhere much to put it. A university piece gets performed once, maybe recorded, and then sits on someone's hard drive.

So this is somewhere to put it. Somewhere that belongs to the people making the work rather than to a platform, an institution, or an algorithm.

What it is

Audio drama, poetry, music and interviews, made and performed by people who are 18 or over. Any country. Any university, conservatoire, drama school, or none at all — self-taught counts exactly the same.

Anyone can ask to join. A person reads every request and listens to every submission before it goes up. Nothing publishes automatically and nothing is ranked by a machine.

How it works

• Tell us what you make. We read it and reply.
• If it's a yes, we email you a private link to submit.
• You upload your work, choose the name you want the world to see, and say whether anyone else's material is in it.
• Someone listens to it properly. If it goes up, you get the link and it appears on your portfolio.

There is no account to make and no password to forget. Just a link in your inbox. It works for 90 days and for as many pieces as you want to send. If you lose it, we will send it again.

Send us everything you make. There is no cap on how much of your work can live here. We ask people not to send more than about twenty pieces in a single day, only because one person listens to everything and a flood makes everybody wait. If you have a backlog — a series, or a whole term of work — tell us and we will make a plan.

What we promise

• Your work stays yours. Full ownership, non-exclusive licence. Publish it anywhere else you like.
• We will never sell it, and never train AI on it.
• Nothing in the feed is paid for. No promoted work, no paid placement, no tracking you around the internet.
• You can take it down whenever you want, for any reason or none, and you don't have to explain.

The full detail is on the terms and privacy page, written in plain English rather than the usual thing.

The Talking Newspaper

When you submit, there's an optional box — never ticked for you — asking whether your recording can be shared, free of charge, with the Hambleton Talking Newspaper for its blind and partially sighted listeners.

That is a gift from the people who make work here to people who would enjoy hearing it. No money changes hands in either direction. Young Voices Out Loud is an independent platform, not a charity and not part of one.

It's also the reason accessibility is taken seriously here rather than treated as a checklist: transcripts, proper buttons, screen-reader labels, a site that works without a mouse. If you have ever found this sort of site hard to use and this one is no better, tell us and we will fix it.

Who runs it

Zootaloot Studios — an independent studio in North Yorkshire. It builds and runs things end to end: the platforms, the engines behind them, and the infrastructure they sit on. This site was built from nothing rather than assembled from parts.

Messages reach a person, not a queue. We aim to reply within one working day.

And it is paid for out of the studio's own pocket. If sponsorship ever covers the hosting, it will be a single clearly labelled credit that never touches the work itself and never influences what gets published.

Getting involved

If you make audio and you're 18 or over, ask for access. If you would rather just listen, start on the home page and press play.

Anything else, the contact form reaches a person.