Blind programmers and sysadmins sometimes prefer command-line tools. But most blind people are now thoroughly accustomed to GUIs. An accessible GUI can be very usable. IMO, it's much better than using a screen reader with a screen-oriented terminal application (ncurses or the like). If you're skeptical, I can put together a little demo of one or two use cases on Windows and/or the iPhone.

> IMO, it's much better than using a screen reader with a screen-oriented terminal application (ncurses or the like).

I suspected as much, which is why I was thinking purely REPL/batch stuff. On the REPL end, I was thinking programming languages (Python, Lua, Lisp, OCaml…), and stuff like gdb. On the batch end, I was thinking utilities like grep or awk, compilers, or ImageMagick. In other words, stuff that would work well with a printer.

I personally have a concrete use case in mind: file encryption, and password manager. I intend to write a first version for the command line, because it will be smaller and easier to write. Then I may do GUI versions. I was wondering to what extent the accessibility of the GUI version even matters, considering how simple the command line version would be.