Right To Left (RTL) version of Read the Docs

[iMashhadi]

Hi
Do you have rtl version or planing for it ?

[agjohnson]

Sorry, this isn't quite clear. I'm assume you're referring to a right-to-left version of RTD?

We support translations here, but no, we don't currently have a RTL centric design. I would love to get input from someone who has experience designing for RTL languages though. Specifically, how user experience and common UI patterns change with the introduction of RTL language translations.

[iMashhadi]

Yes i mean right-to-left version of RTD exactly. and thank you for designing.

[rahmanidashti]

@agjohnson I can help you in RTL design. If you like, you can get my email from my profile.

[yarons]

Well, Hebrew is pretty complete, I think this issue should be back on the table.

[agjohnson]

@yarons agreed!

@rahmanidashti I missed your notification here, are you still interested in helping here?

So, we are going to be prioritizing a redesign of our site styles soon, so this is a great time to discuss design pieces like this. I do however think the larger benefit to users is to have a RTL Sphinx theme -- or an option on our theme for RTL. But I think a lot of the lessons will translate to our theme or at least give us a chance to learn what needs to change there.

The current things I'm not sure how to handle:

• I know RTL interfaces would normally also float things like vertical navigation menu to be RTL as well. Would it be unexpected or bad UX for users that use a RTL language to float a navigation menu to the left side of the screen? Element positioning will be the hardest thing for us to do well, with limited resources.
• What is the UX for a partially translated UI? Is it awful for a interface to be partially RTL, sprinkled with untranslated english?
• Similar to CJK languages/fonts, are there things we probably aren't considering about design? For instance, some UI pieces on RTD, when translated to a CJK locale, absolutely break the UI because we weren't expecting so many characters in the small button. I think this point is one of us studying up on best design practices for internationalization, but I would be curious if there are any common things to watch out for for RTL locales.

[yarons]

This is a pretty simple example of what RTL users expect to see:
https://material.io/design/usability/bidirectionality.html

In case of RTL it basically just like Latin (Although the vowels are hidden or incorporated in the consonants depending on the case) so the sizes should be similar.

For Arabic speakers a Pig is considered "Haram" (literally forbidden) so putting a donation button with a piggy bank is not recommended.

Whenever you see some punctuation to the right (it looks fine in English but not in Hebrew), so the case is something like this:
Incorrect: מה השעה?
Correct: מה השעה?

In English the incorrect version will look something like that:
?What time is it

The best thing to do is to have a design review with the RTL translators on a staging environment when you think it's ready, we'll just push the PRs to the relevant branch.

Thanks.

[FarisZR]

any updates ?

[agjohnson]

No updates on this, no. We likely won't take this on while we are still converting our site to use a css framework.

[smb-h]

any good news with RTL support?

[raddah]

Is there any plan to include the RTL support ?

[agjohnson]

Sorry, no particular updates here yet. I'm still working intermittently on a UI rewrite, but I'm the only one that has been working on this project. I have been careful to avoid elements that are particular about left to right placement, so I'm hopeful that our dashboard can be manipulated easily for RTL.

It is something I'd like to see happen if it's not a complicated matter.

I suppose the magic here will most likely be something like https://rtlcss.com/, which I could work into my testing once I pick work back up on the project.

[yarons]

Is it possible to launch something like netlify with RTL fully enabled and we'll just send the fixes manually?

Thanks.

[omrico]

Will be very useful. Hope to see RTL support in 2023 🙏