Text-Mode Browser

A web browser that renders web pages as text only, without displaying images or graphical layout, typically running in a command-line terminal or console environment. The most well-known text-mode browser is Lynx, developed at the University of Kansas in the early 1990s. Text-mode browsers played an important role in early web accessibility because they provided a foundation for adding voice output — their text-only rendering was more easily converted to speech than the complex graphical rendering of visual browsers. While largely superseded by modern screen readers that work with graphical browsers, text-mode browsers remain relevant as accessibility testing tools, as they approximate the linearized, text-only experience that screen reader users encounter.