SpeechD-Up provides an interface daemon between Speakup (kernel based screen reader) and Speech Dispatcher (common interface to speech synthesis). Using SpeechD-Up, you can make Speakup work with software synthesizers like Flite or Festival. This interface is in no way optimal and it suffers of many problems. Some users still find it useful. If you want to have sound on the console with a commercial speech synthetiser, such as ibmtts, you need a connector between the speech synthetiser and the speakup_soft module. As there has not been any usable connector since Squeeze, this package has this function. It is useless if you use a free speech synthetiser as Espeak, since a connector exists and is packaged: see the espeakup package. It is also useless if you use speechd-el with Emacs.