On-screen text that answers a question

A term, a step or a number can pass before the viewer has understood it. They may keep watching while missing the detail the next part depends on. That is the gap a useful annotation can close.

Knowing the answer can make the gap harder to spot. Review the footage from the intended learner’s starting point, and ask someone at that level where they needed more help.

Text on screen is the cheapest instrument for closing those gaps, and it is almost always used for something else.

Why can you not see where your own viewers get lost?

Because you compressed the steps years ago and cannot uncompress them on demand.

When you learned your craft, the thing you now do in one movement was four things. Over time those four collapsed into one, the intermediate steps stopped having names in your head, and the whole sequence became something you do rather than something you describe. That collapse is what expertise is, and it is also why teaching is difficult.

So when you say just fold it back on itself, you are naming an action that contains three decisions. You made all three. You did not mention any of them, because to you they are not decisions any more.

It gets mistaken for vagueness, and the instinctive repair is to talk more. Talking more does not surface a step you cannot see. A method does.

Finding the question marks

Watch your own video with a pen, at normal speed, from the beginning, and mark the timecode every time one of three things happens.

A word arrives that you have never defined. Any word you would not have known five years before you started. It does not need a lecture. It needs three words on screen while you carry on talking.

A number goes past. Quantities, temperatures, measurements, settings, anything the viewer might have to hold in their head while doing something else. Spoken numbers evaporate. Written ones can be paused.

A step happens without a name. You did something and moved on. If you cannot say what that something is called, the viewer has no chance, and they now have no way to search for it.

Do this once with your own footage and it will feel unpleasant, which is a good sign. The list you end up with is your annotation plan, and it is specific to this video rather than to videos in general.

What should text on screen do?

Answer the question at the moment it forms, and then get out of the way.

A label can name a step, hold a number long enough to use or mark a useful section. A short summary can help too. The test is whether the words support the viewer’s task at that moment.

Which gives you a test for every piece of text you are about to add. What question does this answer, and who is asking it? If there is no answer, the text is decoration, and decoration on a demonstration is a cost paid by the viewer.

When is text worse than nothing?

Three cases, and all three are common.

When spoken and written explanation duplicate each other, check whether the combination helps this learner or divides attention. Keep useful terms, quantities and summaries; remove needless competition. Captions remain available for people who need the audio in text.

When it competes with the demonstration. If your hands are doing the important thing and a word is flying in from the side, the eye goes to the word. You have just moved attention off the lesson, at the exact moment the lesson was happening.

An animated entrance should help the words arrive clearly. If the movement delays reading or distracts from a demonstration, simplify it. A quiet reveal may be enough.

Where should it sit in the frame?

Away from the hands, away from the bottom, and gone before the next question.

Put text where nothing is happening, which is usually the upper half or the side opposite whatever is being demonstrated. Keep it out of the lower strip, because on a phone the platform's own buttons and captions live there. Give viewers time to read the text and look back at the action it describes. Clear it when the next step needs the space.

One more piece of restraint worth having: pick one look and keep it. A single typeface, one size for labels and one for headings, one position on the left and one on the right. Consistency here reads as care, and it is free, whereas a new style for every note reads as improvisation, which it is.

Go back through the last tutorial you published, pen in hand, and write down every timecode where a beginner would have stopped. Then compare that list with where you put text. Wherever the two lists fail to meet is the next version of the video.

Sources and evidence

What here is standards guidance and independent research, and what is our own method.

Standards and platform facts. The W3C's own guidance on captions describes a caption as a text version of the speech and the meaningful non-speech audio needed to understand a video, and it treats closed captions, which a viewer can switch on or off, and open captions, which stay on screen throughout, as both legitimate depending on context. Separately, the research literature on multimedia learning gives text-plus-narration a mixed verdict: segmenting a video and letting the learner control the pace hold up fairly well across studies, but whether spoken and written words together help or overload someone depends on the kind of redundancy involved and what the viewer already knows. That research does not license either extreme, never repeating what is said out loud, or captioning everything as a rule.

Our method. Watching your own footage with a pen and marking every point where an undefined word, an unnamed step or a number goes past, then adding text only where it answers that specific question, is a discipline built for one video at a time, not a formula lifted from a study.

References.

• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. Captions/Subtitles. w3.org. Captions include speech and meaningful non-speech audio; closed captions preserve user control. Open captions can still be a sufficient WCAG technique in some contexts.
• Fyfield et al. Improving instructional video design: a systematic review. ajet.org.au. Segmenting and learner control are relatively robust; redundancy effects vary. Instructional contexts differ.
• Guo, P. J., Kim, J. & Rubin, R. How video production affects student engagement: an empirical study of MOOC videos. dl.acm.org. Across 6.9M edX sessions shorter videos were more engaging; informal styles outperformed polished lectures. Educational-video finding; does not transfer directly to marketing/social video or YouTube recommendation.