Right-to-Left Development: Tips and Tricks

The Middle Eastern market is evolving at a rapid pace and its online presence is growing along with it. However, many software developers suffer from a lack of educational information when it comes to developing right-to-left (RTL) websites for the region and they are often forced to work by trial and error when it comes to RTL in web development.

Authoring an RTL website is an unconventional task, even for an experienced frontend developer. Since languages that are read from right to left, such as Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Urdu, etc., involve making particular changes to the development process, there are a number of specific details that need to be taken into account by developers.

In our previous article, we talked about RTL website design. In this post, we’ll take a look at the peculiarities of building RTL websites and bidirectional websites.

1) In RTL language regions, people read and write from right to left. This means that most interface elements should be flipped in order to be displayed correctly.

2) Elements connected with media-content management, such as “Play” in a video player, don’t need to be mirrored.

3) The order of digits in numbers (such as phone numbers) doesn’t differ from left-to-right writing.

4) Overlining is usually used to highlight text in Arabic (instead of underlining, italics, or interspacing).

5) Capital letters are often omitted.

6) Although intellection and visual information perception have an identical direction of writing – RTL, most people are right-handed. Therefore, it’s better to not mirror some controls so that users can interact with them comfortably. Centering controls and creating a “liquid layout” can help avoid confusion and can better the user’s experience with the website.

7) When combining symbols that can be used in both RTL and LTR languages (such as periods, commas, or other punctuation marks), their displayed positions will depend on the direction of the text. This is because the data format starts from the beginning, but a browser is still processing an RTL word in the RTL direction and punctuation is converted towards the direction that has been specified

Read more - Designing RTL websites