HI John.  Any terminal program will work just fine, to talk to the TNC.
I used to use Commo both in Dos and in a Dos box in Windows and it worked
great.  I don't know how mutch packet activity you will find other than
DX clusters theese days, as most of the packet activity is on A P R S,
and things like that, which don't lend themselves to speech output to
well.

I got my start on packet and computers, with a Commodore 64 and a program
called the inteligent talking terminal.  It wasn't as good as a screen
reader, but it did work and got me on packet before I got a real
computer!  HI HI  Those were the days!

73:
John