Dec 5, 01:34
Usability for non-English websites?
I guess this would be on of the 2,3 entries for this month since this month’s going to be a little busier (I’ll tell you about it in the next posts) so, I picked up a hot subject that’s been puzzling me for a while; a subject that’s kept me busy for sometime. Information Architecrue & Usability for non-English websites.
Is language the dividing line?
Internationalization, i18n , L10n , and localization are terms that you’d face if you seek for multi-language software or web-applications. Language pack is another term you could find as a feature of many applications. So is that it? Turning left-to-right to right-to-left and changing character-set or using unicode; that’s it? Although it’s been appealing and a huge help for eliminating the language barrier against using applications it’s not enough. It’s not enough because changing interface language does not change the IA, nor the UI in most of the cases.
In our case, Arabic (or Farsi ) would be the secondary language.
Logicaly thinking, the whole ball game is different for informatin architecture and the user interface of the application or website because no matter how much westernized or how big of an English reader we’d be we still have our own mindset for the mother tongue and culture. When you think English you’d even answer yourself in English. So to relate it to our concern over here, when a user switches the interface to Farsi/Arabic mode, he/she will start skimming through the interface differently thus, different controls and texts would take his/her focus. If he/she is used to Arabic keyboard shortcuts of let’s say Arabic-Windows XP then the app should apply that.
How UI is different for Persian or any non-English language?
Language reading direction is one of the elements that defines how a UI is supposed to be constructed. What happens is that the reader/web-surfer starts identifying the language first, according to the language he/she starts skimming and folowing word tails depending on the ltr/rtl of the language. So to clarify, if the language used is Engish the user starts skimming from top-left all the way to bottom-right of the page. If not skimming and reading or looking for a particular thing on the page it still goes left to right but in rows. So what’s catchy and notable for an English reader would be totally different in the case of a right-to-left driven language. Okay, so a Farsi/Arabic web page would make the reader start all the way from top-right to bottom-left.
How would the links look like or the navigation layout in Arabic/Farsi website? This is a very tough question. Localized computing in this region (Middle East) is not that matured so to speak—it is only translated and right-to-left oriented following all the rules that an English computing methods follow. So, usualy all the links follow the global (English) kind of the look and feel (bold, underlined which I understand are the global standards for linking and hyperlinks depending on user’s defined CSS on the browser side).
Keyboard’s awkward layout. Even though the language is different still Arabic/Farsi keyboards use the same key layout used in english. My concerns are on Numbers, Tab-Key, Caps Lock key, Function keys (f1-f12), and Enter. For Arabic Numbers are read from right-to-left unlike Farsi and English that read from left-to-right so the numbering order is not the way one learns at school making computing experience a little harder when starting striking keys on early ages. Tab is very tricky, take an example of a data entry application that is in Arabic. Tab keys would go from right-to-left of the screen while Tab key is on top-left side of the keyboard. That is in contrast avoided by habit even though it is a major abnormality and anti-smoothnes on the input curve.
Localization: Many Arabic/Farsi sites fail!
So let’s get back to UI. Once text direction is defined either using CSS (direction:ltr or rtl) or using the Dir attribute of HTML tags every element on the page is oriented according to that direction.
What happens to numbers and dates? Unless you’re on an Arabic-Local box or your regional settings of your OS is set to Arabic or Farsi you’re going to get English digits or whatever you’ve set to display in your regional settings. The whole website is in Farsi/Arabic but still the numbers and dates are to be shown in English. Imagine clicking on a date control and you get a month’s days all in English and then again everything goes in Arabic. Isnt it even a little confusing. Of course it’s usable but not optimised for non-English users. gettext?
Special characters such as !, ?, ;, :, ., etc… are left-to-right characters so they make Farsi and Arabic text to get obfuscated where you can’t make-up where a sentence begins nor where it ends.
UTF-8 please! What’s worse than dialing a webpage address that shows you some weired question marks and other characters? That’s what happens when a page is made using a character-set that doesn’t exist on your computer. Even if that character-set is installed on your computer then you have to select that particular character-set and then reload the whole page which would engage 2-5 clicks. Is that something a potential prospect would do on a website? Isn’t that risky for any web presence and all the investment made on the website?
Typography
A couple of days ago AMEInfo (a leading online news provider for the Middle East region) released an Arabic version of their news website . While I’m sure the content would be great I still find the whole usage of type goes to an unwanted direction. Unlike English text if you select Arial font for instance, it’s alright. However, Arabic fonts tend to be smaller and hard to read. Many websites use bold for all kinds of text as a solution. Other smarter designers use Tahoma as it is a better font and better read. Yes, they’re really limited number of fonts available for use on web documents in Arabic.
So what’s the solution? While some of the websites use images, some others have used proper sizing for text and the weight. CSS is really enough but the font selection is a massive limiter. No, not even sIFR can help! Check out some good usage at Al-Bayan .
I’m still wondering how AMEInfo is still using non-bold styling for their navigational links. It was really confusing for me the first time I opened their homepage. I hope they’ll bold it up and use a non-black color too. AMEInfo, it’s a webpage! care about your users and make them feel home on the web. White space please!
Headers, titles, links, paragraphs, quotes, etc… follow the same rules used in English writing since they all come down from traditional writing methods used in print.
Read enough, show me the money!
No greens out here. The bottom line; changing text direction and translating the whole copy of an English website to Arabic/Farsi is not enough. Just about everything else is included. I believe researches and further development would be answering and ironing many of these concerns but just a reminder again, a language pack, and a rtl is not all that about it.
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Sunday June 11, 2006
Ejaz Asi said:
Even though I am neither Arabic or Persian, but since Urdu (my native language) uses the same RTL style and similar problems as you describe, I find your post to be worth sharing with others as well.
#Yes, RTL does NOT solve problems, nor does the SiFR or even font-embedding technology at Microsoft. From typographical point-of-view, CSS with auto-download-install proper fonts might be better solution for now. More laters.