speechd-el getting started

[Peter Vágner]

Hello,
Recently a discussion on emacs and its accessibility solutions took 
place at the orca list.
I tried working with speechd-el and emacs some 8 years ago or so when 
there was a freebsoft cd rom available to try out all these packages. 
Since that time I have adopted linux as my main platform on the desktop 
and now I am looking for revisiting my journey towards learning emacs 
and stuff.

I'm on Arch linux and This is what I did:
- I'm already running speech-dispatcher all the time as I run orca.
- Installed emacs-nox 24.5 package from the community repository.
- Downloaded speechd-el 2.7 from 
http://devel.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd-el/speechd-el-2.7.tar.gz
- Unpacked it and ran make compile in its folder to generate elc files.
- Created a folder ~/.emacs.d/lisp/ and placed all el, elc and info 
files inside.
- Added the following few lines to my ~/.emacs
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp/")
(autoload 'speechd-speak "speechd-speak" nil t)
(speechd-speak)
- Started emacs from the gnome terminal.

I have only been able to skim emacs main window using orca as I am 
getting no speech output as a result of doing all the described steps.
I think I have briefly seen ann error stating can't connect to socket 
~/.speech-dispatcher/speechd.sock. However I haven't remembered it. I 
can't see it again on a subsequent emacs startups. I'm exiting emacs by 
keying C-x C-c and rerunning from the terminal.
My speech-dispatcher socket is at 
/run/user/1000/speech-dispatcher/speechd.sock .
I have tried manually exporting $SPEECHD_SOCK enviromment variable prior 
to running emacs but I can't see this error again nor I can hear voice 
output.

Can you please give me some hints how to proceed next  to get speechd-el 
talking through speech-dispatcher?
How to see some emacs and / or speechd-el debug output to figure out 
what's going on for sure and avoid the guess work I'm currently doing?
How do I check speechd-el configuration to see if it's connecting to the 
correct socket?
Can I also install speechd-el system wide? I have figured out some 
packages e.g. git have installed some el files into 
/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/ . How do I find out if emacs is looking into 
this patch? If I was about to create emacs-speechd-el package where 
should I install it into?
Is there something else you can suggest to me?

Thanks and greetings

Peter