Move explanatory words from on-screen text to narration when animation is active

Move explanatory words from printed text to narration when viewers must watch an animation. For example, use animation with spoken explanation rather than animation with concurrent sentence text placed under or beside the graphic.

Printed text and animation compete for the same visual channel. Moving the words to audio frees visual attention for the animation and lets viewers select relevant words and images without split attention.

Mechanism: Narration off-loads part of the processing demand from the visual channel to the verbal channel, so viewers can watch the motion while also following the explanation.

Evidence: Across six studies, learners showed better problem-solving transfer from animation with narration than from the same animation with on-screen text (Mayer & Moreno, 2003).

• User Goal: Understand how a process or system works.
• Task: Follow visual change and verbal explanation at the same time.
• Data: Ordered steps in a causal process.
• Chart Setting: An animated explanatory graphic currently uses concurrent on-screen sentence text.
• Audience: Viewers learning unfamiliar material.
• Success Criterion: Viewers can explain or apply the process after viewing.

Break it when: The explanation is not competing with a concurrent animation or other visually demanding graphic. Why: The supported overload scenario is split visual attention between printed words and moving visuals.

Sacrifice: The wording is no longer persistently visible on the screen during the animated sequence.
Risk: If you keep the full on-screen text as well as the narration, you create the separate redundancy problem the paper also found harmful.
Mitigation: Remove the concurrent full sentence text from the active animation frames.

Mistake: Keeping a sentence block on screen while the animation continues. Why it fails: Viewers still have to divide visual attention between reading and watching.

Failure Sign: Viewers must look away from the moving graphic to read the explanation for the same step.
Quick Check: Watch a few animated steps. If the only explanation for an active step is sentence text on the screen, the visual channel is still overloaded.
Stronger Test: Compare the same animation in two versions, one with narration and one with on-screen text, and see which version lets viewers keep their eyes on the motion.

• Replace concurrent sentence text with spoken narration.
• Remove the active explanatory text from frames that continue animating.
• Keep the narration concurrent with the same animated steps.