Question about formatting

[susanreads]

I hope this is a suitable place to ask: Is there a recognised semantic markup for distinguishing visuals from audio in a transcript? I've been using [brackets like this], but I doubt screen-readers pronounce them. I can make text appear in italics with em or q or cite tags, but I don't know whether any of those are distinguishable in other formats.

Comments

Perhaps useful datapoint?

[jesse_the_k]

I understand it's not your original question, but in captioning/subtitling, brackets are used to enclose audio info which isn't visible on screen. For example:

[three gunshots]

or

When speaker is on-screen
[sighs heavily] Why do you always lie to me?


When speaker is off-screen
Chris: [sighs heavily] Why do you always lie to me?

Re: Perhaps useful datapoint?

[susanreads]

Thanks. When I attempted to merge my audio transcript and part of terajk's visual description in this post, I went with explicit tags, like "Visual:" "Narrator:" "Caption:", because there doesn't seem to be a standard shorthand. I guess no transcript will suit everybody.