I imagine that the code editing experience for blind people might be somewhat comparable to using line-editors? Although especially with hard copy terminals you don't need to keep everything in your head
Line editors prevailed for a long time, not because of user preferences but because they were tiny and was shipped by default. In PC-DOS/MS-DOS edlin.com/exe was what was available until the full screen editor edit.exe shipped some years into the 90s. Almost all home computers came with a variant of BASIC in ROM, which also used line editing (not even with a proper editor but by substitution of whole lines).
It's pretty easy to get used to line editors, you get used to using the search command to position the cursor on the correct line and change command to modify it. Some friendly line editors include DEC's EDI and EDT (PDP-11) and E (Motorola Exorciser).
UNIX ed is nice in that it has has regex support, but I don't like its side effects- that p, l and i change the cursor line.
I had no use for edlin since screen editors were available on the IBM PC.
I tried but never got used to TECO: this is like a screen editor, but no screen: meaning the cursor could be anywhere in the file, including in the middle of a line and it's up to you remember where it is. Some TECOs had a screen mode where it would show you the buffer and cursor position in one window, but accepted normal TECO commands in a separate command window ("TVI" on TOPS-20 worked like this, EMACS was a TECO extension).