Edit: just realized that you were talking about software in general, and not (web) documents. This comment assumed you were talking about webpages. That being s

Edit: just realized that you were talking about software in general, and not (web) documents. This comment assumed you were talking about webpages. That being said: this comment might be useful to someone else, so I don't have the heart to delete it. Original comment: Supporting terminal-based and line-mode browsers doesn't prevent you from supporting graphical browsers with screenreader support; on the contrary, it can actually help improve cross-browser compatibility by encouraging authors to use simpler progressively-enhanced technologies. Using a textual browser encourages authors to focus on text, and to think twice about non-textual content. Tables and images have their place, but should be used judiciously when ordinary text simply won't convey an idea well. The result is an even more accessible page for everyone, whether they're using a braille reader, dictation, "reader mode", a printout, or a hacky webpage-to-markdown-to-epub shell script. Supporting 100 edge cases with under four users each is too much to ask, but supporting plain-text browsers automatically covers a wide variety of such edge cases with no additional effort.