Unable to Start Yasr

Hi,
I am unable to get Yasr to start under Debian.
In the Yasr config to connect to different speech engines the software
choices are either Speech-dispatcher or Eflite from what I know of.
Eflite seems to be dead and will not talk.
Speech-dispatcher requires the connection to be established to the synth
over a unix socket connection and Yasr is looking for a network based
connection.
What can we do to get this lite weight screen reader functional again?

Tom