Actually I found her fadora howto much more helpfull, if you use fedora, then her email stream today would lead you to think. We all can play different roles I guess. It seems to have a lot of good suggestions for how to get speakup if you use a kernel compiled with speakup as modules, that means you can start and stop speakup on a running system. If you choose to use a system like debian, there other places which might serve you better if you use a version of speakup deb provided on the debian site.
