iPod shuffle voice over broken

I own several ipod shuffles (2GB) as it's the best device to listen to audio books for elderly people like my grandma as it's basically a single purpose device and all the others come with a million features which nobody will ever use but which make the usability a nightmare. Actually there is not even an alternative, so I have to deal with this. However, recently the support for voiceover was either removed or it's broken. On my Macbook in Apple Music you can check the box for voiceover but you can no longer pick a language, so the voiceover is now English where it should be German. So I went to iTunes on my PC where you can tick the box for voiceover and you can still see the pulldown menu for languages but it's greyed out. But even the box does not work. If you tick the voice over box and hit "apply" it works for a second and then the box is unticked again. I tried rebooting, upgrading iTunes and even restoring the iPod, nothing works. Please fix this feature, this is more important for my Grandma than you could imagine. The voiceover is actually the only way she can select which audiobook is being played (we are talking Audible here) as the iPod reads the title and you simply hit play when you like what you hear. But since this is broken now it reads the German titles as if they were English and I can't find a way to fix it. Thank you for considering this.