Linux “Screen-Reader tool Orca” extendable/customizable functionality in Ubuntu?

Question

Here is what i want to do:

01) I want to set Orca as an idle process that runs in the background after i booted into Ubuntu 11.10/Gnome-Shell 3.2. (No problem there so far.)

02) Now when i open up a text file or website in my webbrowser i want to be able, to highlight text and use a keyboard-shortcut in order to let Orca read the selected text back to me.

My problem is, that Orca once initialized as a running process permanently reads back everything, from mouse-over actions of a button to system related actions etc.. Sure i can make adjustments in the preferences, but not enough to reduce it, to what i have asked above. Orca might not be the right application at all for this task and a common speech-synthesis application might be even better.

Anyway if someone knows how to make it work that way it will be fine. As an alternative a speech-synthesis like function, like apple offers would be even be better. Again, i only want a "read back" option for "selected text" that is invoked with a shortcut of my choice. No copy/paste, say -o -f cmd etc..

Answer 1

Would Festival do what you want? http://www.ghacks.net/2010/10/09/linux-text-to-speech-with-festival/

You also have http://clickspeak.clcworld.net/index.html or http://www.firevox.clcworld.net/installation_linux.html wich is a plugin for firefox

Answer 2

I found the answer here, in this comment, which does the trick in combination with festival:
(Although, these "free" speech synthesis are not even close to be as good as they ought to be!!)

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wizo chocs says: March 2, 2012 at 12:49 pm

create this script xtalk

#!/bin/bash

xsel | festival –tts –pipe

• set it executable chmod 755 xtalk
• create a new custom keyboard shortcut, any key combo, i use ALT+X and the prog to run is your xtalk script
• select the text u want read press ALT+X