speakup and vim problem with key echo

[Adam Myrow]

These problems with vim seem to be related to UTF-8.  I have UTF-8 
disabled in Slackware, and vim works properly.  To disable UTF-8, you have 
to pass "vt.default_utf8=0" to the kernel at boot time.  Then, set your 
LANG environment variable to "en_US."  This is a non-UTF-8 version of 
English.  In Slackware, this is the default, but my understanding is that 
it is not in most other Linux distributions.