you forgot to install orca. Also, enable espeakup with sudo systemctl enable espeakup

Orca's a desktop screen reader and there's no desktop environment in there, so its not needed. Though curious why you installed pipewire if you're not going to do desktop stuff.

Yeah you can get away with alsa_utils. I'm not very experience with pipewire, but from my understanding, it's a framework that tries to create a compatibility layer between alsa and pulseaudio. For apps that don't know any better, pipewire can perform as either of the aforementioned tools, but, for apps that know about pipewire, it offers extended functionality. To what end, I'm not sure though.

Once  Ratpoison is installed you'll need Strychnine

So install Ratpoison, future readers with sudo pacman -S ratpoison

Now for Strychnine, To get that...

git clone https://git.2mb.codes/~stormdragon2976/strychnine

sudo pacman -S dialog yad xorg (or xorg-server

Grab Orca and its stuff too

cd strychnine

./setup.sh -x

./setup.sh

After that just log in, type startx and you got ratpoison up and going

Ah do you have Ratpoison installed? I assumed from your last post you already did. My notes were from a system that already had ratpoison

Strychnine looks for a file manager, web browser, text editor and a few other things when you do ./setup.sh as well. Assuming that all went well..

Rattpoison+C brings up your terminal
Ratpoison+? brings up key bindings (super super useful
Ratpoison then W opens up your web browser

Ratpoison 1 through 0 goes directly to that window, no need for alt tab)

Okay is there a .xinitrc file in your home directory and you did everything up to and including ./setup.sh -x right?

I'm going through those steps on my own system and not running into it. All else ails I'll put my .xinitrc file here for you or others to copy and use3

What does your .xinitrc contain? If it's the standard Strychnine one, then it should work however.

It sounds to me like something is off in either your packages or .xinitrc

or a graphical one I'd say PcmanFM or for a console one, you'll want DragonFM from the AUR. Which is a whole different kettle of fish really and not somethng a novice user should be diving into right away....so I'd say PCmanFM for a graphical one for now. When you want a console based one, grab dragonFM from the AUR

EDIT: You can simply add to the .ratpoisonrc

For example where it says bind  exec you'd add the path to the file manager, such as bind f exec /usr/bin/pcmanfm

Then just hit ratpoison and control alt R to reload the file, and you don't need to log out or reboot. The other thing about Strychnine and starting a desktop with startx, is you can have multiple desktops and ust switch them out by changing one word in a file, no need to fight with login managers or stuff that doesn't speak with Orca

Man, that's the joy of ArchLinux. Once you got it setup, it is amazing.

One trick with the startx/.xinitrc file is this:

If you install another desktop you can switch to it easily

just open up the .xinitrc and go to the end and change exec ratpoison to the desktop you installed, and put exec orca & above that, which will cause Orca to load then load the desktop or window manager you want