The Lab Rubric specifies that if a video walkthrough or lecture is provided, then narration describes all of the actions that the student must perform to complete the lab.
Very few of our instructional videos currently meet this standard. For example, here's a short excerpt of a video that Marc Goodman (one of the authors of this report) created as a lab walkthrough for his CIS 122 course shell (the actual video used in the course shell includes captions for the hearing impaired, which are not reproduced in this excerpt. Here is a link to the full video used in the course):
As you can see from this video, very few of the things that Marc says in his narration match what Marc types in the video exactly. In addition, some of the code that Marc types has no associated narration at all. Marc also clicks on a line to insert text, without describing which line he is clicking on, and refers to a "yellow box in our dialog." All of these issues will make the video far less useful for a blind student who is attempting to complete the lab. Three methods for making this video more accessible are:
An example of matching the existing narration to the actions performed onscreen is given in the table below:
| What Marc Says | What Marc Types |
|---|---|
| "So I Dim Number as Single precision floating point number" | Click on the line after the line that reads "'Variables: Place your Dim statement here." Type: Dim Number As Single [Carriage Return] |
| "And Dim Square as Single precision floating point number" | Type: Dim Square As Single [Carriage Return] |
| "And then, our Module Name goes here" | Click on the line that says 'Driver Module Name: <--- Enter the driver module name... and type in the module name "Square" after the ":". |
| "So, the first thing we want to do is input our number" | Click on the line after the line that reads "'Place your code below here." Type: Number = InputBox("Please enter a number.") [Carriage Return] |
| "Now we have our number and we want to calculate the square. In Visual Basic, you can raise a number to a power like this." | Type: Square = Number ^ 2 [Carriage Return] |
| "And finally, we want to output our line, and the way we're outputting our line is we're going to change the caption on that yellow box in our dialog. So, we say LabelOut.Caption is equal to" | Type: LabelOut.Caption = |
| "and we want to add our new line to the existing output. So, we get the existing caption" | Continue typing on the same line: LabelOut.Caption |
| "and we add ..." | Continue typing on the same line: & "The square of " & Number & " is " & Square |
| "and now we want to end the line. I'm running out of space, so I'm going to put an underscore to continue" | Continue typing on the same line: _, [Carriage Return followed by indentation, followed by] & |
| "So, first we want to break the line and we want to output a blank line after that. So that each of our outputs is separated, just like in the lab specification." | Continue typing on the same line: vbNewLine |
| "So we write ..." | Continue typing on the same line: & vbNewLine [Carriage Return] |
| "So, that's it!" | Nothing |
Note that this content might also benefit students who are not native speakers of English, have hearing impairments, or who have cognitive impairments that make following along with the video more challenging. For a closely related standard, please see the section on providing instructions.