[orca-list] lost speech upgrading from jessie to stretch

[Al Sten-Clanton <albert e sten_clanton verizon net>]

Greetings!  Apologies to anybody who saw a variant of this post on the 
Blinux list, but this list seems a reasonable place to ask for help with 
at least the Orca part of my problem.

Yesterday, after a fair bit of reading, rereading, and following what 
looked like relevant advice from that reading, I ran the upgrade from 
jessie to stretch.  I used "apt-get dist-upgrade."  It seemed to be 
successful in most respects; it didn't abort, anyway.

When I rebooted, I got what clearly were a bunch of Speakup messages. 
Apparently, the upgrade enabled espeakup.service, which I had disabled 
in order to run my own script for getting speakup.  At no point did I 
get Orca, not even using the super-alt-s keystroke.

When I got myself into a terminal, I tried disabling espeak.servvice. 
When I rebooted, there was no speakup, but also no orca; again, the 
keystroke to bring it up did not work.

I went into a text terminal, which of course was speechless.  I tried 
enabling espeakup.service again, just to get some kind of speech, but 
this failed.  I tried a couple more times.  (I know I was in a terminal 
because the poweroff command did shut the machine do2wn.)

I suspectt there's this particular thing or two I need to fix, but I 
don't know what that is and have no speech anywhere to find out.  At the 
very least, I'd like to get Orca talking, and then maybe I can retrieve 
my previous speakup set-up.  I'll be grateful for any help.

Al

[p.s. I've read the accessibility section about disabling pulseaudio.  I 
may do that again, but when I did it the last time it preventing my 
listening to an online radio station, hence the script for using speakup 
after I was logged in via the gui.  I hope to use speakup with my 
Tripletalk LT, but that will come later.