lost speech with upgrade from jessie to stretch

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Greetings!

I upgraded from jessie to stretch this afternoon, after reading the 
upgrade section of the release notes and other oddds and ends.

When I first rebooted, I apparently got speakup talking real slow.  I 
had disabled espeakup.service after installing jessie, so I guessed the 
upgrade must have re-enabled it.  Also, orca never came up.

I did

systemctl disable espeakup.service

and rebooted.  Speakup didn't come up, which I expected.  Orca never did 
either.  Using alt-super-s didn't work.

I was never able to get speakup again.  Enabling espeakup.service didn't 
work.  Trying to run the script I created to run it after I'd gone in 
with orca (which I didn't have this afternoon) didn't work.  using 
modprobe to load speakup_soft with staert=1 and then running the command 
espeakup didn't work.

I therefore have no speakup and no orca.  I know I went into a couple of 
terminals, where I typed these commands, because the poweroff command 
actually shut the thing down.  With no speech, though, it's hard to 
figure how to either disable pulseaudio according to the Debian 
accessibility instructions or retrieve my previous set-up.  I'll be 
grateful for any pointers.

Al