Betsie and other text only conversion applications

Just wondering on what people on this forum think about applications like
Betsie which convert webpage content to text only on the fly. For more info
see:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/betsie/inverse/index.html

It seems to work as far as I can tell and is a solution to the problem of
people not updating their text only pages - the code is very ugly, but is
presumeably fine for a screen reader?

Is anyone aware of other applications that do this better?

Jamie Mackay
Web Editor
Ministry for Culture and Heritage
New Zealand