Accessibility frustrations

[nolan thewordnerd info (Nolan J. Darilek)]

If this already exists then do let me know, but would it be possible
to have better logging in Gnopernicus and the various GNOME
accessibility components?

Recently I had a situation where, after a fresh Ubuntu install,
Gnopernicus stopped working. I had no idea why. The logs were claiming
that speech was initialized, but nothing spoke. I don't think that
Debian or Ubuntu include the test binaries, so I snagged the latest
gnome-speech and tried building it . . .

I'll save the long list of additional things I tried by skipping to
the end. I'd added my computer's hostname after localhost in
/etc/hosts to have it, not localhost, appear in my emacspeak window
title . . . and I think this may have somehow caused Festival to start
refusing connections, as the machine was no longer resolving to
localhost (or, it was, but my computer's hostname was actually
returned for lookups of 127.0.0.1.)

I'll do more testing on this once I've gotten over the novelty of
having a working machine again. :) Are there logs other than my
.xsession-errors that might have helped me resolve this? Would it be
possible to add such facilities, even if it means proxying application
connections through some layer higher than festival to create the
context of a logging facility? (I.e. gnome-speech opens a TCP
connection and pipes all received data to whatever backend driver is
in play, so if it refuses a connection then the refusal is logged by
gnome-speech.) Or perhaps this is already possible? Admittedly, I'm
not very familiar with CORBA and GNOME's use of it.

And, because I don't want to send another message for a (hopefully)
simple question . . . :) How can I have Gnopernicus work after sudo?
If, for instance, I want to run gksu, synaptic and friends, currently
any windows spawned after the sudo don't speak at all. I've enabled
GNOME accessibility for root, but this doesn't seem like it's enough.

Thanks.