I was about to 'fix' the applet, which, as David has suggested, should be trivial. However, I thought I would install the speak module and speech applet to test the 'before' behaviour, and lo and behold the fi and fl ligatures are spoken correctly. The version of the speak module I am using is 2.18 (19 Feb 2003). Do different versions of the speak module behave differently? Chris... -- Chris Johnson