It is very confusing when using my phone with a right to left language enabled and none of the apps switch the directions of the swipes and gestures accordingly. Swiping right to left will consistently bring up a menu on the opposite side than what I'd expect and vice-versa.

@thufie

(Genuine question)

What about RTL languages makes your brain expect the direction of gestures to swap?

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@mossfet because the same direction swipe will often cause a UI element aligned by the text reading direction to show up on the opposite side of the screen. It is hard to describe without an example so here I will add some screenshots showing what I mean. These are from the Wikipedia app, and both of these table of contents pop-outs appear when I swipe from right to left, which only makes sense for LTR languages like English.

@thufie ooooh i getchu

i did remember on hebrew wikipedia the little quick info box is flipped, but i suppose i was expecting that if the gestures weren't flipped then the UI elements wouldn't be either

that's rlly annoying yeah

@mossfet I think Android itself flips a lot of these elements automatically, but the trouble is that flipping these elements is never logically linked to how they were opened to begin with, so the inputs for the UI aren't localized along with the UI.

@thufie this feels like something that could be fixed by introducing a localised setting for swipes

something like idk, window.addAction(SwipeLeftButActuallyRightIfYouReadRTL)

Name pending

@thufie so you could introduce that on the UI toolkit level and not introduce a bunch of work for developers having to reimplement that every time

@thufie if most developers are using LTR languages (which they are) we could call it something like SwipeLeftLocalized

Which is a bit annoying ("Why do LTR readers get the name while we only get the localized addendum?")

Buuut I think most western devs aren't thinking about it enough to think to pick the localized option if you use a more accurate name (SwipeInDirectionOfTextDirection? Whomst?)

Like even it appearing in their code completion as they write "SwipeLe..." is useful

@mossfet it is a hard problem for sure. I think as things are, much would need to be heavily redone. Ideally, there would be no use of the words "left" or "right" in text UIs (games and abstract apps would still need these). Might need to be replaces with "inwards" and "outwards" relative to the appropriate UI element, since that wouldn't make an assumption about LTR or RTL text.

@thufie part of the problem might also be the conflation of UI layout with text direction. I know HTML does that a lot

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