Is using voiceover adding any value to e-learning?

For the past couple of years, I've been moving aggressively away from voice-over narration. Voice-over narration only seems appropriate when your course is content-oriented. The more you move toward a performance-oriented style--in which learners are asked to practice doing whatever it is you are teaching them--the less useful or appropriate it is to narrate to them.

For example, here's a sequence of screen-captures from a recent Emergency Management course we created, from a section on how to respond to earthquakes:

The small text boxes fly onto the screen one after the next, with a slight pause between them. As the learner rolls over the various possible places to take cover, those places receive a yellow outline. The learner is invited to click where he or she will “drop, cover, and hold on!” during the earthquake and then gets feedback about the choice:

Then there is a little bit of non-interactive information presentation:

Still no narration. We try to put the descriptive callouts right next to the parts of the image they describe and we try to keep the amount of text to a minimum.

Judicious use of the Continue button allows us to parcel out the narrative in small chunks so the amount of text on-screen at any one time hopefully never becomes overwhelming and doesn't obscure too much of the high-context imagery that makes the learner feel immersed in the space.

Then we’re into the next decision the learner must make, and so on…

Since the learner is more or less constantly making decisions (and even when we're not asking the learner to make decisions, we try to keep him or her in the workspace so it still feels like a rehearsal/practice for the event), there doesn't seem to be a need for or benefit to voice-over. The course is more action oriented--you are practicing how to respond to an earthquake, not just listening to someone tell you about it. Since you are doing it, what purpose would voice-over narration serve?

As we move toward this kind of action/decision-oriented e-learning design, we find ourselves leaving voice-over narration behind more and more.