Orca not speaking on new Debian install.

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Okay, did a little searching and found the sleep command, which I used
to confirm that Orca is getting launched when I try running the script
I'm using. In fact, it seems that Orca remains active even once I
close the appliaction I launched and the script finishes, and only
gets unloaded when I logout of the tty that executed the script with
sudo kill on orca's process ID apparantly failing.

As for spd-say, I'm not sure I'm using it right, but trying to run

spd-say "hello world"

or

spd-say -O

just results in the console hanging on a blank line until I ctrl+c.
Granted, doing the same from a KNoppix live session, where the script
works as expect, spd-say "hello world" does nothing and spd-say -O
prings espeak-ng to the screen.

Forgot to check at-spi while I was booted into Debian, but it sounds
like the problem might be with speech dispatcher.