In today's multi-media digital files, the time-aligned annotations appended to segments of the text are read by machine, not the text (i.e., source data) itself, nor, necessarily, a transcription of the source text, whether spoken or signed.
despite what many signed language researchers continue to believe, a full written phonetic or phonological transcription of signed texts is no longer essential in order to conduct corpus-based research at various levels of linguistic analysis, even the phonological.