Lesson 5 Instructional Environments and Multimedia
5-5 More on the Redundancy Principle
Have you ever had someone read text from a slide to you? Did you find it helpful? The redundancy principle (Clark & Mayer, Chapter 7, p. 131) requires that we either use audio OR text to explain images. It’s redundant to provide an audio of the printed text and it’s ineffective.
Example 1
Graphics are described by words presented in the form of audio narration, not by concurrent narration and redundant text. Billy Collins action poetry is an example of purposeful redundancy.
Example 2:
When language is challenging, words are presented as text. In this Air New Zealand Safety video the “captioned” text is present for all viewers but separated from the main action.
Exceptions
- Short text labels are expanded with audio narration.
- On-screen text can be narrated when the screens do not include graphics.
⭐ Shar’s Note: Think about voice-over audio or descriptive audio as being part of this redundancy that helps to explain what the user is “seeing”. It is important that the audio is not reading long phrases of text from the graphic unless you are providing captions.