Phone number links in contacts / text?

[edent]

Use Case

As a user, I want to be able to click on a phone number from my mobile browser and have my phone call the number.

At the moment, phone numbers are rendered in plain text. Depending on the browser, they may be clickable.

Additionally, the user may not know that they need to add an international dialling code (+44 for UK numbers).

Suggestions

• Repurpose the email syntax, so <020 7946 0123> is automatically converted to <a href="tel:+442079460123>020 7946 0123</a>
• Validate the regular Markdown of [020 7946 0123](tel:+442079460123)
• Use a magic token like $P to indicate a Phone Number.

Additional

Perhaps add some metadata / microformat to help with indexing / search?

References

• http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3966.txt

[keithiopia]

Has there been any evidence to suggest users need this or would understand why a phone number is a link on desktop/laptops?

[edent]

Only that I tried to contact the DVLA via GOVUK and it was very annoying that I had to copy & paste the phone number.

Tried in Chrome, Opera, and Firefox for Android.

I'm not sure how best to go about testing whether regular users find that a barrier to contacting people.

As for clicking on desktop - a tel link tends to open Facetime on a Mac, and other dialers on other OSes. I'm not sure if that's different from an auto-linking email address if someone doesn't have an email program installed,

[keithiopia]

I could flag it with the user research people if you like?
I'm sure it could be incorporated into some other GOV.UK benchmarking.

[edent]

👍

[edent]

As an example of a site which uses the tel schema https://peoplefinder.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/people/terence-eden

[edent]

Just as a note, over a third of visitors use a mobile device https://www.gov.uk/performance/site-activity/device-type

[edent]

As an alternative - we have a mandated standard for contact exchange.

Would it be sensible to have vCards on all "contact us" pages?

[keithiopia]

That's an interesting idea - but would devices get updated when departments/helplines change their number or address?

[edent]

No - but that's no different from today. I assume that departments which change numbers / emails / postal addresses maintain the old one for a suitable period of time.

[edent]

We've just passed the fourth anniversary of this request. What's the best way of getting some progress on this?
It's quite important for knowledge-graph work that machines can know what text on a page relates to a phone number.

[keithiopia]

We've just passed the fourth anniversary of this request. What's the best way of getting some progress on this?
It's quite important for knowledge-graph work that machines can know what text on a page relates to a phone number.

We've long passed the tipping point in mobile use where having tel: links makes sense.

I don't know why I'm the only person who replies to you about this, but it's been a nice bit of continuity over the years.

@nicholsj who do you think could make a decision on adding this to govspeak?