> In addition, I wish screenreaders had a text mode, where they print what they say and maybe provide cues on possible actions.

NVDA, mentioned prominently in the article as a free and open source screen reader, has a floating-window-style speech viewer. I sometimes use it when demonstrating a screen reader user's experience of a particular component when asked to share my audio, because slowing down the screen reader to a rate that everyone on the call will understand will also make the meeting much longer.

JAWS also has a speech history viewer, and there are keystrokes to dump VoiceOver speech as text and audio files.