EPUB asides marked with literal asterisks break audio-text alignment

Many published EPUBs mark inline asides/footnotes only VISUALLY (e.g. <p class="class_s3m">*The famed Walled Cities...</p> with a literal * character and an italic CSS class) rather than with semantic markup like <aside epub:type="footnote"> or <a epub:type="noteref">. Visually identical, but a chasm semantically. Audio-text alignment tools (Storyteller's n-gram + Levenshtein aligner, MediaOverlay/SMIL pipelines, screen readers) only handle reordering at the granularity of the markup signal — epub:type="footnote" triggers inlining of footnote text into the parent paragraph during alignment, making audio order = text order. Without it, the aligner treats the asterisked paragraph as a sibling, can't reorder, and when the narrator reads it inline (which they almost always do for short asides) those audio chunks either misalign onto similar nearby sentences or fail to match entirely — visible as 'the highlight skips X words between the reference and the aside, then realigns after.' Most EPUB readers don't expose this in regular reading, so the markup quality issue is invisible until you try audio sync.