I’m assuming that the objective of the litigants was not to crater access; even if they were in a mean-spirited mood litigation is a lot of trouble to go to merely for the lulz.
That said, ADA-and-similar do face a bit of a conundrum with this sort of situation. If they do something; by far the cheapest response is to just pull the material(machine-generated CCs tend to suck; and human ones can cost a small fortune, especially by the standards of a program that isn’t attached to any real funding source, and exists primarily because delivering files over the internet is pretty cheap); which creates a “So now nobody gets it? Nice job breaking it, cripples!” situation, which is unflattering at best.
However, doing nothing creates the also-likely-to-be-unhelpful impression that anyone who can offer something on a ‘golly shucks, just doing what we can here’ basis is effectively exempt from ADA compliance; which creates an incentive to, say, move as much course material as possible into such just-being-altruistic-here repositories to avoid being responsible for expensive and tedious work; which will likely result in negative effects on accessibility over time.
It’s sort of like the “What possible reason could there be to not allow dying patients to try experimental therapies?” question. If you consider only a single round of the game, it’s hard to imagine a good reason: yeah, most of them probably don’t work; but the non-experimental ones definitely don’t work, so it’s hard to lose.
If you consider multiple rounds, though, the easier it is to deliver ‘experimental, just trying things here’ stuff, the weaker the incentive to ever go for demonstration of efficacy or approval is; since just stringing it along as ‘in testing’ forever becomes viable.
