Many of us want to run the graphical orca screen reader on a raspberry pi, the credit card sized computer for the ultimate in portable computing experiences. This has been done before. I got this working last night and by popular demand, here are my instructions. Be warned, I went down a few rabbit and may be installing a few extra packages but at the end, orca is working.
My thanks to Michaele A. Ray of the website raspberry VI website for doing this first and showing that this is indeed possible and to the members of the raspberry-vi mailing list for help and urging me to write this post.

Prerequisits

You will need to have the following items.

• A usb keyboard plugged into the pi for use on the pi console.
• A pair of headphones or speakers connected to the headphone jack.
• The raspberry pi should be powered and connected to the internet. A wired connection is the best as it is stable and easy to troubleshoot.

1. Download the full raspbian image

   Download the latest image of raspbian from the below link. Get the full image as opposed to raspbian light. This is because the image has a lot of the graphical user interface things installed.
   download raspbian

2. Getting the image on to the sd card

   Burn it on to a sd card using your program of choice. If you are using Microsoft windows, one of the most accessible programs is balenaEtchar

3. Enable ssh at boot

   Once the image has been written, you will see 2 logical partitions on the sd card. There is a partition called “boot”. Create a blank file named “ssh” without the quotes on that partition. The way I do this on Microsoft windows is to go to a comma dprompt, switch to the drive that has the partition and then issue the following command.
   copy con ssh
   You will be in a line editor. Hit ctrl+z to save and close out of the file.

4. Eject the card and load it into your pi.

5. Boot the raspberry pi and login to it over ssh.

6. Update the raspberry pi
   This step is crucial. Failure to do this will result in orca not speaking. Run the following commands.
   sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
   Once the above commands have completed successfully, reboot the raspberry pi.

7. Configure the pi to login to a text console

   run the following command.
   sudo raspi-config
   Read the screen output very carefully. You need to go into the boot options and enable the option to login to the console without a password.

8. Once you have enabled the login, and are back on the main raspi-config screen, hit shift+tab once to save your settings and exit. Reboot.

9. IInstall dependencies

   This is the trickiest part of the entire exercise.
   Orca needs a bunch of things to run. As of this writing, speech dispatcher and espeak are not installed by default.
   sudo apt-get install sox -y
   Install the sox package for multimedia libraries. Some of them may be needed by speech dispatcher.
   sudo apt-get install speech-dispatcher -y
   Install the speech dispatcher service. Orca needs to talk to speech synthesizer. Be warned, this is an older version of speech dispatcher. There is a new one available on github but I have not tried compiling it from source on this installation.
   sudo apt-get install espeak -y
   The espeak speech synthesizer
   sudo apt-get install gnome-orca -y
   The orca screen reader and associated dependencies

Once you have carried out the above steps, reboot the raspberry pi. The text console login comes in handy here. Ensure that you have a USB keyboard plugged in. You may want to ssh into the pi to ensure that the pi has booted. If you have configured the raspberry pi to automatically login into a text console, you can enter the following at the command prompt. Be warned, at this point, you do not have any speech therefore you should know your keyboard well.
startx
You will have to wait for at least 2 minutes for the gui to load. I am giving a safety margin. Once again, you do not have speech at this point. Press alt+f2. This will place you at a prompt where you can enter a command to execute.
Type the following
orca
You will need to wait yet again but you should hear orca talking.

There is much left to do. I am still working on how to start orca automatically once the gui loads and need to find a good way for this to coexist with a console screen reader such as fenrir. I will update this post as I get feedback and learn more.