Testing Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu layouts

Right-to-left testing involves more than moving a paragraph to the right edge. Text direction, the placement of punctuation, and the relationship between content and controls all deserve inspection. ViniIpsum provides sample paragraphs in Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu so you can exercise the text regions in a prototype.

Set direction on the text region

When a region contains right-to-left prose, specify its direction with dir="rtl" and its language with the appropriate lang value. Keep surrounding interface controls in their intended direction. ViniIpsum’s plain-text preview changes reading direction; HTML export includes direction and language attributes on the exported elements.

Keep logical text order

Copy Unicode text normally. Do not reverse its characters to make it look right on screen. Reversing characters can damage copying, reading order, and search behaviour. Inspect the exported result in the actual browser component rather than relying solely on the visual preview here.

Test mixed strings separately

General prose cannot cover every address, price, email, number, or product identifier your interface will display. Add realistic examples of your own. Check parentheses, quotation marks, and punctuation around mixed-direction content. Where strings have an unknown direction, investigate appropriate semantic direction handling for the component instead of hard-coding text alignment.

Check the controls around the text

Open menus, focus inputs, select paragraphs, and copy text using the keyboard. Check that labels remain associated with their fields and that action buttons remain identifiable. A text-area preview can look correct while the surrounding form is still confusing. Test actual mobile widths and text resizing as well as your usual desktop layout.

Use fluent review for final copy

The included samples are not a verified translation of your interface. Use them to identify layout problems, then replace placeholders with reviewed final content. Guidance on semantic direction is available in W3C’s HTML direction guidance.

Open Arabic, Hebrew, or Urdu sample text. For a wider test plan, see multilingual layout testing.