Can I improve this progressive enhancement?
I believe this is more trouble than it is worth. You may be shooting yourself in the foot since your complicated solution might not work as you expect for the different configurations you want to support. Designing for accessibility is not only "turn off CSS and JS and see how it works out", but "test that my code works for all these settings". I believe you're doing it wrong here.

A simple proposal

Did you consider the simplest approach?

&lt;li&gt;My Course Name
  &lt;span class="tools"&gt;&lt;a title="Edit" href="/edit/id"&gt;✎&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a title="Remove" href="/delete/id"&gt;✕&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/span&gt;
&lt;/li&gt;


CSS:

.tools { float: right }



This is going to work for CSS haters (?), old browsers and lynx. As for "accessibility users", most of them use real browsers, but need bigger fonts or high contrast designs. This means that my solution will not work only for speech synthesis (the speech synthesis of Google Translate skips complicated Unicode characters) but will work on any normal browser (even if the old-old browsers doesn't understand "float", the Unicode symbols will be displayed next to the course title).
The title attribute (thanks to ANeves) will help confused users hovering on the icons! I do this all the time for StackOverflow icons. This is great accessibility for normal users, but probably won't help for speech synthesis and the like.
Extra bonus: the CSS is simple to understand


I don't know how well your width:1em trick is going to work on browsers. It might be perfect, but it might not work as you expect at all.

If you really care about speech synthesis and make sure that your website really supports it (eg. do you follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?), then go on with your solution as long as it doesn't hurt other users.

(Also note that you're using a multiplication mark, why not using something like "BALLOT X" which I feel has better semantics and might be rendered in a way that might make it look better http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_mark ?)

Update: added a title attribute, as ANeves proposed in comments.