Unpredictable notification speech

[Nolan Darilek]

Hello, wondering if anyone else has seen this and if there's a fix?

Sometimes notifications via notify-osd speak fine. I've actually come to 
rely upon these for various bits of functionality. Since I can't just 
glance over to my IM contacts window, for instance, I use these 
notifications to notice when a friend I want to talk to logs on.

But sometimes these notifications don't speak. This seems to happen on a 
session-by-session basis. For instance, sometimes I'll get a session 
where notifications speak perfectly. Then, one GDM restart later, they 
aren't. Also, sometimes notifications stop during a session, and once 
stopped they never start again.

I've found my .cache/notify-osd.log. It is receiving events. I see a 
notify-osd process running. What I don't see when a notification appears 
are messages in Orca's debug output indicating that any sort of event 
has been received.

The challenge here is that I don't know if the notifications are 
actually appearing on my screen and notify-osd isn't generating 
accessibility events, or if notify-osd needs some other applet running 
to display these accessibly. I also can't seem to pin down what makes 
events start and stop working. I know that they were until recently 
working quite reliably, and I thought that perhaps a bug had gotten 
fixed somewhere, but after the latest Karmic updates they've stopped.

Has anyone else seen this? Does anyone have a fix? This is incredibly 
frustrating, particularly as I don't know with whom to file a bug. Happy 
to do so, I just need to know what isn't working.

Also, I thought that maybe the indicator applets might give some clue, 
but there are bunches of those, and I'm thinking they aren't it. I also 
see a notification area applet that I wonder if I should add? It doesn't 
appear to be running already, even though notify-osd is and seems to 
have a number of GUI libs linked against it, suggesting that it is 
responsible for the notification bubbles. Amd if the notification applet 
is what is responsible, why wouldn't it already be running since 
notify-osd is fairly Ubuntu-specific?

Thanks.