I tried that myself, but it was impossible from a custom renderer access the buttons in that row.
what I did at the end is add a class to the tr and then define an style for that the icon in the tr with this class:
JS: custom renderer:
skuid.ui.fieldRenderers[field.metadata.displaytype][field.mode](field,value);<br> field.item.element.addClass(rowactionClass); //Important!!! after the renderer.
I suspect the HTML entities are not in the Dom (or correctly wrapped) when the renderer is executed. The renderers maybe create js objects (or an xml markup) assigned to the tr and when all the table is defined (filters, row actions, fields…) is drawn. But this is what I think.