Ok, so this is just a quick message to people who were having issues with vim reading weirdly in utf-8 mode with speakup. You can change the encoding vim uses internally to latin1 which will turn off utf-8 and then if you need the file in utf-8 you can change it back right before you save. So what I've done is put this in my .vimrc set encoding=latin1 and then if I for some reason need to save in unicode I can set the encoding to utf-8 before I save the file. This way you can keep your default locale at utf-8 for things that need it and because pretty much all distros are expecting unicode these days. A bit clunky but it works.
