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

[lightgetsin]

A standard, no, not as far as I know. Brackets are not part of the baseline set of screenreader punctuation articulations, though they can of course be easily added by people who want to use them. Same thing for italics, using whichever markup. I have italics turned on but not brackets because I use the first and not the second.

[theplotbunny]

I use Jaws for Windows screen reader, and find that it does read [] left and right brackets in speech, I cannot be certain of other adaptive screen readers, but it does work, funny thing is, with left and right quotation marks, only under certain conditions do these get read out, otherwise it is just quote this and that, I think in html fields and text boxes when posting my fiction/fanfictions on some web sites that the left and right quotation marks are identified but not in word... I hope this helps, I am not tech minded, although I have picked up a little here and there. Jaws however, will only identify italics character by character using a specific hot key combo, but if you read a sentence, paragraph etc, it won't tell you whilst reading, as you need to stop and hover over a word to check if it is italicised or not. freedomscientific.com create Jaws, and they need to work on these things too, but the software is so expensive that if a student or not working, you need to save for over a year or more to afford upgrading. ^_^

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.