Arch Linux post installation issue

[Linux for blind general discussion]

I'm not familiar with Arch, but you might want to double check that

speech-dispatcher-espeak-ng

is installed. Debian lists it as a recommended package for
speech-dispatcher, and I understand Arch is biased towards installing
less, so it's possible that installing speech-dispatcher and espeak-ng
didn't automatically pull in the plugin they need to communicate with
each other.