Ah, that page reminded me ("[Edbrowse] was originally written for blind users") of my blind friend from high school who used ed (if connected to unix remotely) or the similar DOS program, EDLIN (to edit locally). This was around 1992. He had a laptop with a fancy add on card and BIOS which would do text to speech of whatever was in the video cards text-mode character buffers. He could have it read character by character if needed. (He wrote most of the C code for a programming competition we were in. He never indented though...)

Hey, great link, thanks. I'd never heard of it before today.

From there I followed a link by the author of edbrowse, Karl Dahlke, called "Command Line Programs for the Blind" [1] which is a great read in general and a really good reminder that accessibility is so important.

[1] http://www.eklhad.net/philosophy.html