I got gentoo to boot and espeak although in the default run level with speakup-soft=soft enabled in the kernel espeak is silent. I know the system booted since I uncommented the TUNE line in grub and also added in pcspkr into the kernel so was able to do a root login and then hit backspace and the pc speaker beeps. I did not yet emerge alsa-utils if such a package exists in gentoo yet. I'll have to use the install disk again and get to chroot /mnt/gentoo environment again and try to emerge alsa-utils to run speaker-test. I did hear speakers click twice during the boot process so those probably work. For me it takes about 2 days to do this kind of linux install with gentoo and even with fedora moonshine that took less time to install and have come up talking. I did not go the systemd route, systemd looked lots more complex and I'm having plenty of trouble with openrc as things stand. More later as I find it out. Probably good an accessibility podcast for gentoo is never done, I think such a podcast would deter any potential accessibility users from ever attempting an install of gentoo.
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