This is false. Only GUI terminal emulators do it this way, and only some of them. Programs like BRLTTY can attach to the likes of screen(1) sessions and kerne

This is false. Only GUI terminal emulators do it this way, and only some of them. Programs like BRLTTY can attach to the likes of screen(1) sessions and kernel virtual terminals. KVTs very much do have grids of cells, and that's exactly what BRLTTY opens and reads, as a matter of fact. A vcsa device file is an array of character+attribute pairs.