It's surprising because Google loves to use handicapped and disabled users as example cases of how important their technologies are. One of the most prominent early videos for the self-driving car project hinged on the idea that it would let a blind person go to a drive-thru at a restaurant.
When they turn around and cut off a surely much less cost-heavy accessibility feature seemingly at random, to many users complaint, it is, in fact, surprising.
As far as recourse, it'd be a bit of a stretch to use the ADA here, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if someone tried a lawsuit in this instance: Google is cutting off handicapped users for almost no real cost to themselves.
Based on what I've seen, it can't even cope with simple plain English - in a video I watched earlier, in just the first 90 seconds, "This subject has" -> "If his subject has", "A weapon that was" -> "Her weapon fat was", "spherical shape" -> "severe achill shape".
Whenever I don't understand something, I used to skip back and turn CCs on - this works fine if they were made by a human. It never works when they're automatically generated; if I can't understand it, there's a 100 % chance the automatic captions are garbage, and even if I can easily understand it, the automatic captions are still wrong like 80 % of the time.
Hell, it even sucks at accented English. A friend turned me onto the UK series Taskmaster, which is available on YouTube. I turn on captions/subtitles as a matter of habit, and the auto-generated captions for that show are atrocious.
Yes, that show includes a variety of UK English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh accents, but... damn, it's bad.
Even if that was so, it's a bit like saying that blind won't need braille because there's text-to-speech. And English isn't the only language on youtube
When they turn around and cut off a surely much less cost-heavy accessibility feature seemingly at random, to many users complaint, it is, in fact, surprising.
As far as recourse, it'd be a bit of a stretch to use the ADA here, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if someone tried a lawsuit in this instance: Google is cutting off handicapped users for almost no real cost to themselves.