whole bunch of questions!

[Sam Hartman]

>>>>> "John" == John G Heim <jheim at math.wisc.edu> writes:

    John> In debian stable (weezy) and testing (jessie), speakup with
    John> software speech crashes if you start orca. A fix may be in
    John> ubuntu because it's also in the old version of sonar which was
    John> based on ubuntu. I didn't check out how they did it but they
    John> probably compiled espeak with pulseaudio instead of alsa. IMO,
    John> the espeakpackage developers should make this an installation
    John> option.

I cannot reproduce this.
I've been using Debian with espeakup and orca quite successfully with
wheezy and jessie.
It's true that you cannot use espeakup at the same time as orca.  The
issue is that  pulseaudio hogs alsa without dmix, so only pulse
applications can play sound.

For a variety of reasons you want pulseaudio to be per-session not
global.
If you started pulseaudio globally espeakup would use it, and if you
really want to use speakup and Orca at the same time, then I'd recommend
doing that; it is a system level configuration in /etc.  However, I've
found that I'm happier with espeakup until my graphical environment
comes up, then sticking with Orca and emacspeak within X.

--Sam