Often mirrors
Navigation flow, directional chevrons, progress direction, side panels, aligned controls, and spatial “next/previous” metaphors.
Right-to-left review checklist
Mirror the flow, not every symbol.
Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, and other right-to-left experiences require more than moving text to the right. Review reading order, direction isolation, controls, icons, numbers, and mixed-script content together.
Human review required: this checklist helps expose visual and interaction defects. A fluent reviewer must still assess wording, shaping, punctuation, and cultural expectations.
Page and component direction
- Confirm the document or localized subtree uses the intended direction rather than scattered manual alignment.
- Check that columns, breadcrumbs, step indicators, carousels, drawers, and back/forward affordances follow the product’s RTL design rule.
- Verify focus order and reading order in the live product. A screenshot cannot expose DOM order.
- Test both the RTL locale and a left-to-right locale after any direction fix.
What usually mirrors—and what may not
Often stays literal
Play buttons, media timelines by product convention, clocks, mathematical notation, brand marks, maps, and real-world handed symbols.
These are prompts, not universal laws. Document the product’s rule and have design and locale specialists confirm ambiguous icons.
Mixed-direction stress cases
- Arabic or Hebrew text containing an English product name.
- Phone numbers, dates, times, percentages, prices, negative values, and ranges.
- URLs, email addresses, file paths, issue IDs, and code snippets.
- Parentheses, quotation marks, slashes, colons, plus/minus signs, and trailing punctuation.
- Placeholders and validation messages that mix user input with translated copy.
Capture examples with the actual Unicode content. Do not “fix” ordering by inserting visual spaces or punctuation until a qualified reviewer checks the logical string and isolation strategy.
Glyphs and clipping
Inspect joined letterforms, contextual shapes, diacritics, dots, baseline, line height, and font fallback at high zoom. Test multiline labels and text inside controls. Cropped dots or marks can change meaning even when most of a word remains visible.
Record a defensible RTL finding
Name the locale, browser, viewport, component, exact mixed-direction string, expected order, and observed order. Attach the unedited screenshot pair and, when possible, the source string and DOM direction context in the external issue tracker.
Primary references: W3C guidance for HTML direction, Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UAX #9), and RFC 5646 language tags. Apply the versions and product requirements relevant to your release.
Can a mirrored screenshot prove keyboard order is correct?
No. Visual position and focus order are independent. Test the running interface with a keyboard and appropriate assistive technology.
Should every arrow reverse?
No. Reverse arrows that represent interface direction when the product rule requires it; preserve symbols whose meaning is intrinsic or globally conventional. Escalate ambiguous cases.
Can pixel diff detect bidirectional text bugs?
It can highlight a changed region, but it cannot tell whether the Unicode ordering, isolation, shaping, or punctuation is correct.