Didn't YouTube have auto-captions at the time this was discussed? Yeah they're a bit dodgy but I often watch videos in public with sound muted and 90% of the time you can guess what word it was meant to be from context. (And indeed more recent models do way, way, way better on accuracy.)

I have a few Deaf/Hard of Hearing friends who find the auto-captions to be basically useless.

Anything that's even remotely domain specific becomes a garbled mess. Even watching documentaries about light engineering/archeology/history subjects are hilariously bad. Names of historical places and people are randomly correct and almost always never consistent.

The second anyone has a bit of an accent then it's completely useless.

I keep them on partially because I'm of the "everything needs to have subtitles else I can't hear the words they're saying" cohort. So I can figure out what they really mean, but if you couldn't hear anything I can see it being hugely distracting/distressing/confusing/frustrating.

Yes, but the DOJ determined that the auto-generated captions were "inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities." [1]

If the automatically-generated captions are now of a similar quality as human-generated ones, then that changes things.

[1] https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...

Definitely depends on audio quality and how closely a speaker's dialect matches the mid-atlantic accent, if you catch my drift.

IME youtube transcripts are completely devoid of meaningful information, especially when domain-specific vocabulary is used.