[orca-list] alsa doesn't working

[Michael Weaver <weavermicha googlemail com>]

Looking at documentation on Speech-dispatcher and judging by someone's
answer as regards my Orca problem it seems to be implied I should
perhaps use Alsa.
However I can't seem to get it working from the Sound Preferences in
GNome menus when I select the Alsa in the device tab because when I
press the test button Orca states some message about the device not
being able to be used because of the device being used by another
driver.
How do I resolve this before I get speech-dispatcher configured?
If it helps my laptop I am using is a Compaq Presario 140 which has had
an upgrade to half a gig ram so I could install Ubuntu independently as
it wouldn't do it with the original amount of memory I had with the
machine.