Hello, Karen. There is a variety of assistive technologies for Linux that is either being used widely and under current development. As far as screen readers speakup is perhaps the most well known, but not the only one. There is another screen reader called yasr that is not to bad, uses software speech, and is great for those Linux users who either do not have or can not afford a hardware synth which is required by speakup. There is the brltty screen reader which is perfect for those Linux users that only wish to use a braille display for console access. It is a great screen reader, but it is for braille only. New on the seen is the gnopernicus screen reader. This screen reader works in the x window system on the Gnome 2.4 desktop. Many of gnopernicus's key features are in a state of development, but it can be used to work with such x window applications as gedit which is like Window's notepad, Staroffice 7 which is like MS Office, gnome cdplayer which is like the Window's cdplayer, and a handful of other gui based apps. Finally, there is the emacspeak audio desktop. Emacspeak is a very handy extention to gnu emacs that allows full text to speech in emacs with such programs as the tnt instant messenger, emacs irc client, emacs text editor, emacs text games, dismal spreadsheet, and many other emacs modes. It is a very helpful tool for productivity. Hth.
