Does anyone have a guide to the E speak screen reader?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Honestly, I can't blame the OP for getting the name wrong, there are
quite a number of packages that work together with rather confusing
names.

That said, he's a break down for the OP:

1. speakup is a kernel module that provides screenreader
functionality, but which is rather useless on its own.
2. espeak is one of several text-to-speech engines available for
Linux. Technically deprecated and superceded by espeak-ng, but not
quite everything that uses it has migrated yet.
3. espeakup serves as a bridge between speakup and espeak, allowing
the former to use the latter to actually synthesize what it's reading.

All three combined form what is probably  the most widely used
accessibility stack on talking, command-line only Linux systems, but
are far from the only option available. Unfortunately, because of
their similar names, people frequently refer to the whole stack by one
of it's components or get the names of different components mixed up
and even I sometimes get confused as to whether a poster is talking
about the stack as a whole, one of its components, or which component
they're talking about.

To add to the confusion, there's also speechd-up, which serves a
similar purpose to espeakup, but bridges speakup to speech-dispatcher,
itself a bridge that provides a consistent interface between screen
readers and speech synths, and there's piespeakup, a fork of espeakup
written for the Raspberry Pi to get around some bugs in the Pi's sound
system.