Can pulseaudio be made to work with consoles and Orca at the same time?

[Bill Cox]

I'm trying to get a basic Karmic system working with the two critical
applications for the blind: Orca and speakup.  Pulseaudio is being a
huge PITA.  Whether I use espeakup or speechd-up, pulseaudio is
launched as another user as soon as the speakup module starts during
boot.  However, when the user logs into gnome, another instance of
pulseaudio is created.  The first one locks the sound card, and the
second is mute.  Orca wont talk.  If I kill the first one, Orca comes
up talking, but then my Ctrl+Alt+F[1-6] consoles stop talking.

Any basically usable Linux system for the blind needs Orca and speakup
working together.  Pulseaudio, SFAIK, only allows one instance to use
the sound card at a time.  Pulseaudio also requires each user to have
his own copy.  Speakup runs before any user logs in, and therefore
must run as it's own user.

Therefore... pulseaudio can't work on any truely accessible Linux box?
 Is this basically true?  If this can be fixed, which peice of code
needs fixing (I'm willing to fix it)?  Should we try and make multiple
instances of pulseaudio play nice together so they can share the sound
card?

Bill