My app is in Hebrew, which works fine except from text alignment and headaches with confusion between text and punctuations. All my text is still aligned to the left, which is not very Middle-East styled .
Also if you want to do it completely right, linked screen should then slide-in from left to right rather than right-to-left. And also, the main layout should be right-aligned too, with the Hamburger menu to the right, the ‘+’ button to the left, and the tabs ordered right-to-left.
Would be nice to have a per-app right-to-left settings option.
Wow!, I have seen how Hebrew is right-to-left but never thought about the fact that other things would be that way too. Just curious as to how many websites do this? I mean does Google or any of the big companies like say the Automobile companies switch to this kind of design if Hebrew is detected as the users language?
Almost all qualified Hebrew (and Arabic) apps have a complete right-to-left convention. It goes even the way (physical) books are browsed, with the covers inverted compared to latin languages.
If you define Hebrew as your language with, say, Gmail, you will see it in action. Well, that’s if you have the courage to, as it may be irreversible until you find the “languages” menu in Hebrew .
Very interesting. I was actually talking with someone about this and they mentioned a friend who was an advocate for the blind. In the US we have an ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) which dictates that all public facilities (with very few exceptions) have accommodations for the disabled. It is typically geared toward physical barriers to people in wheel chairs, but covers a broad range of things. In any event this person sells and writes software tools that are added to webpages and apps to accommodate the blind. Mostly reading written words and allowing verbal commands. It’s not an ADA requirement as far as I know but just one other thing for developers to possibly enhance apps with.
I guess it would depend on your customer base and the market you are going for as to whether it makes economic sense to implement features. The issue with any company would be a matter of resources and priorities. When having the choice of adding 10 features that 90% of the customers are asking for vs. 2 that only 10% of the customers are asking for, assuming both take the same amount of effort and resources, which ones do you think a company is going to implement?
The question would be how many of my target market, or the entire market over all, only understand Hebrew or Arabic vs. the ones that can understand both Hebrew and English? It may be a large percentage or a small one, that would depend on many factors. Obviously in your case it sounds like you have a lot that fall into the first category.
Well, it all depends on what market share is represented by the Middle-East. There is a demand for sure. I’m telling my friends around about Glide and they all get pretty excited.
I don’t know about other countries in the region, but I can tell you that in Israel a high percentage of the population is fluent in English. Nevertheless, there is a big added value when an app is entirely in Hebrew. It is just more friendly for native Israelis.
I don’t think that R2L support is very complicate to implement. You did 90% of the job by supporting Unicode. It’s mostly a sign change to add to the layout code.
Just to be clear, I do not work for Glide nor represent their position on this subject in any way. I’m just an avid user and pontificating my perspective.
Oh I thought you were concerned about Glide business
In general, it is always worthwhile supporting more languages, and every app I know aims to do so. What’s bad about a few millions more potential customers ?
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