Mark up TTY (teletypewriter) TDD (telecommunications device for deaf) telephone numbers with semantic HTML microformats

A 2014 SearchEngineWatch.com confidently declared that Google launched support for new schema.org markup that helps your organization define specific preferred phone numbers when listed on your website

Itemprop parameters also allow you to indicate:

  • if a number is toll-free
  • if TTY/TDD service is available for deaf or hard-of-hearing
  • if the number is specific to a country, certain countries, or is global

… but it didn’t link to a shred of documentation for that, so i’m not linking to it.

But, in fairness, google itself provided nothing, the developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/local-business page is a bit of a joke in its thinness and searching that section for TTY brings up nothing, and Search Engine Watch gave me the hope to keep looking, and the realization to use the itemprop keyword while doing so.

An example under W3C’s WebSchemas/CivicServices provided the model i needed. Here’s our adaptation for Find It:

<span itemprop="servicePhone" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ContactPoint">
  <span itemprop="contactType">TTY</span>: <span itemprop="telephone">{{ content.field_findit_crm_tty_number }}</span>
</span><br />

The Schema.org definition for ContactPoint also uses government service as an example, but it doesn’t seem to be limited to that, and certainly seems applicable to not-for-profit organizations and companies.

Related:

Extended microformats module to get an e-mail field formatter that adds the needed itemprop.