I've installed Emacspeak on my Dell Latitude D630 laptop running Debian 8.0 Jessie.

It's version 3.9 Big Dog, which I don't think is the latest version.

I had to edit the Makefile for the speech server to increase the tcl version from 8.4 to 8.6.

It works very nicely in a Mate terminal window, after pressing caps lock+s to stop Orca talking over the top of Emacspeak.

In fact I am writing this post with Emacspeak instead of my usual nano and I have to say that in a lot of ways I prefer it. There is still some tweaking to be done to my .emacs file.