2

I'm trying to implement a system that has an IVR component and must be Section 508 (accessibility) compliant. According to the 508 reference guide at http://www.uspto.gov/about/offices/cio/section508/04telecom.jsp this means:

1194.23(c) "Voice mail, auto-attendant, and interactive voice response telecommunications systems shall be usable by TTY users with their TTYs."

It seems like a DTMF-only IVR should be able to interact with TTY/TDD devices, but common modern IVR technologies (twilio, tropo/voxeo) have no support for TTY/TDD at all, and searches for tty/tdd + ivr don't find anything useful.

I'm sure we could code something up that could send/receive baudot, but 508 compliance is a common requirement and I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

How do organizations deal with this? Just rely on the FCCs free Telecommunications Relay Service?

Otto Blorstead
  • 71
  • 5

1 Answers1

1

When I was at Bell Labs, I added TDD detection to some of AT&T's DTMF detectors in the network. If this work has been extended to the current network, then you may be able use it in your application. Network-based IVR, the last I checked, was not for complex applications.

TDD is a simple protocol but is very vulnerable to "talk-off," that is, to triggering on human speech. The AT&T detectors were very robust against talk-off; if you write your own detectors, you'll probably want to use a separate phone number for TDD users.

Moshe Yudkowsky
  • 83
  • 4