Do additional, visual elements in recorded lectures influence the processing of subtitles?

Abstract

Given the recent and sudden transition from classrooms to online teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic, more emphasis is being placed on providing the same classroom experience to students on an online (or e-learning) platform. To increase accessibility to online content, subtitles are sometimes added to videos, but this may come at a cost. Not only is the addition of subtitles an extra source of information to be processed, the type of subtitle may differ (automatic or standardised) and subtitles are in competition with other sources of information that also need to be processed. This can result in subtitles becoming redundant, failing to contribute to accessibility at all. This study was conducted to determine how the processing of subtitles was influenced by redundant information (graphs, tables, etc.) on the screen, using eye-tracking data. Two different types of subtitles, automatic and standardised, were also used. Findings indicated that the standardised subtitles were 45% more likely to be processed than the automatic subtitles and that both types of subtitles were 24% less likely to be processed with redundant information. The findings suggest that great care needs to be taken when adding subtitles to videos and how these videos are structured.