espeak-ng on archlinux

[Linux for blind general discussion]

It sounds like espeak-ng is working properly, but that you might be
mistaken about how the different components of the accessibility stack
work together.

espeak-ng is a speech synthesizer, it only speaks the text that is fed
to it. You could probably get it to read the output of another command
by piping that command's output to espeak-ng, but what you probably
want is a screen reader that will automatically feed text on the
screen to espeak-ng.

The most widely used options are probably to use espeakup to bridge
the speakup kernel module with espeak-ng or to configure Fenrir to use
espeak-ng as it's synth, though there are others, and sadly, I have no
experience manually setting any of these up on distros I'm familiar
with(Mostly Debian and it's derivatives) and no experience with Arch
at all.