Tips for gnopernicus and Debian?

["Nolan J. Darilek" <nolan thewordnerd info>]

I've been trying to move away from Emacspeak, and toward other
accessibility products. Debian's gnopernicus (and several other gnome
accessibility packages, for that matter) seem to be very out of date,
so I'm trying to roll my own.

I have gnopernicus working, sorta. It works (though not with other
applications) until I use the following .xsession:

export GTK_MODULES="gail:atk-bridge"
export GNOME_ACCESSIBILITY=1
export GDK_USER_XFT=1
/usr/local/bin/gnopernicus &
#/usr/bin/gnopernicus &
exec /usr/bin/x-session-manager

at which point it fails with:

gnopernicus-Message: speech initialization succeded

gnopernicus-ERROR **: Cannot register a listener for event "focus:".
aborting...

(gnopernicus:3727): gnopernicus-WARNING **: srcore exited.

I've compiled my own gnome-speech, gnome-mag, gail, and many other
things. Here is an ls from my /usr/local/src:
at-spi-1.5.2  gnome-mag-0.11.2    gnopernicus-0.9.4
gail-1.5.8    gnome-speech-0.3.2  libgail-gnome-1.0.4

The problem seems to persist no matter what I upgrade; I haven't, to
my knowledge, upgraded something that caused this to break.

I've also removed some of Debian's gail packages and symlinked from
/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules into the tree where my modules are installed
(incidentally, can anyone tell me how to add another directory to
GTK's module search path?) but the results are still the same.

Does anyone have any tips on what I might try? Debian is an awesome
distribution, but gnome 2.6 has, to my knowledge, only recently made
it into unstable, and I know that several other packages I currently
use (emacspeak, for instance) are at least a year, in some cases more,
old. Are there any other packages I might try upgrading? Should I just
give up on debian gnome and go with garnome?

This is a semi-OT question, and it isn't intended to start a flamewar,
but are there any mainstream distributions of Linux with up-to-date
accessibility support included? I was very impressed with Gentoo
(whose gnome packages were up-to-date and bootdisks included speakup)
but compiling everything from source wasn't for me, and I somehow
managed to screw up my gentoo install after only two days (I had no
idea unmerging my nvidia drivers would cause my initscripts to
segfault. :) Are there any debian-based distributions or branches that
are a bit more up-to-date? What about Fedora? Can anyone recommend any
others? Extensive package selection and a more up-to-date
accessibility framework are my two biggest criteria.

Thanks.