NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA)
Let us all have a look at NVDA. It is a a free and open-source screen reader for Windows that is being developed in Python. Despite this it is impressively responsive. It is in fact so responsive I do not see a need to rewrite it at all (at least not at this point). Using the very lightweight eSpeak synthesizer you can easily compare the performance to that of using JAWS with Eloquence.
I have translated part of the application into Swedish, and as eSpeak has quite a promising Swedish voice this seems to work quite well!
