Hi:
This is tough. I would like to configure a machine to pickup and read (text to speech) email for a blind user. (Someone newly blind but a proficient end user as an adult) My gut feeling is that a text based system in Linux is the most approachable. I am hoping someone with a lot of experience will set me on the most likely path to success.
Text entry will be the easiest for the user but this doesn't exclude using keyboard commands in a graphical system. Is a command line system viable to automate getting connected, picking up mail and sending output to a text to speech converter?
Is there an available mail client for the command line interface?
What text to speech generators are there?
Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.

I know about following TTS applications:
mbrola, festival, cepstral, espeak. From those cepstral and mbrola have (IMO) best voices, but cepstral is commercial. Also here was a small flamewar about TTS. Also I heard about "emacs speak" system. Unfortunately, all those programs are just TTS - they say text, but I don't know how to connect them to (say) KDE so it will read window headers, etc, but I think there should be some systems/optionis to do this.

I also think that installing braille terminal might be good idea. This isn't TTS, but IMO this might allow faster working with computer when compared to TTS.Again, I have no experience with those devices, but I know that they exists and that linux supports some of them (because nethack has braille-related linux section in their FAQ).

Hope it helps.