Pipewire and Orca and audio

[Linux for blind general discussion]

I think Pipewire's idea of your hardware is the real problem here. Pipewire 
actually has access to hardware and jacks and such that Pulseaudio can't even 
see. For example, I put Pipewire on an Odroid N2, and for the first time, I 
could see and even use my 3.5mm audio output. I could only see the HDMI output 
using pulseaudio, unless I plugged in a USB audio device. That said, HDMI may 
still be the default on many systems, so this could be causing a problem.

On the machine where you can login but have no speech afterward, you may try 
running mate-terminal and entering something like
sudo cp -a /var/lib/lightdm/.config/pipewire .config
sudo chown -R 1000:1000 .config/pipewire
Since you have no speech after login, you will need to run those commands 
blindly, but this should fix your problem.
~Kyle