Re: usability questions about Arabic script on UML sequence diagrams

["(Imed Chihi) عماد الشيحي" <imed dot chihi at gmail dot com>]

Hello Yanic,

2007/1/15, Yanic Inghelbrecht <yanic dot inghelbrecht at avondschool dot be>:
>  I'm currently developing a program which lets users create UML sequence
> diagrams with ease. It is my aim to make this program usable for as many
> people as possible, including the Arab development community.

Paying some attention to the Arabic language will also buy you the
support for nearly all semetic languages or languages using the Arabic
script, that is Farsi, Urdu, Hebrew, etc.

>  Arabic example :
> http://fapomatic.com/show.php?loc=0702&f=example_arabic.jpg
>
>  English example :
> http://fapomatic.com/show.php?loc=0702&f=example_english.jpg
>
>  As I know nothing about Arabic, the words on the Arabic example are along
> the lines of "message seven", "value four", "object two", etc. I have used
> translate.google.com for this, so the result is probably not very good but
> that's not important right now.
>
>  I have three open issues about how an Arab developer would use sequence
> diagrams and I hope that you can help me out with them.
>
>  -----
>
>  Issue 1 (language related)
>
>  Would Arab developers write their code in Arabic or in English
> (specifically : names of methods and variables). I'm asking because I wonder
> if they produce their sequence diagrams with Arabic script or do they
> generally stick to English script?

I'm almost sure that developers in the Arab world use English in
porgramming for portability reasons and to make it easier to
communicate with non-Arabic speaking users. This may not be good news
though, since you'll have to worry about bidirectional text which may
be a bit confusing at times.

>  -----
>
>  Issue 2 (direction related)
>
>  You can see from the examples that the Arabic version uses a completely
> different layout to account for the right-to-left reading/writing direction.
> Execution starts at the top right of the diagram, while it starts at the top
> left in the English version. Also, the diagrams have been optimized for the
> reading direction : most arrows point right-to-left (Arabic example) and
> left-to-right (English example).
>
>  My question is this : does the right-to-left layout feel more natural to
> you on the Arabic example? I haven't found any sequence diagrams on the
> internet with Arabic script so I have no reference on this, but I assume you
> would prefer a layout that follows the reading/writing direction? Or perhaps
> the use of English books is so common that everyone is used to a
> left-to-right layout even though they use a right-to-left script?

I cannot speak for everyone on this, but I, for one, find it more
natural to read diagrams from right-to-left. I would say this is a
plus to have, but if it gives a headaches to implement, then most
Arabic-speaking developers would still live with a left-to-right
diagram.

>  -----
>
>  Issue 3 (font related)
>
>  Please look at the Arabic example at 100% zoom for this. Are the word
> legible enough for you or would you like to see them bigger? The Arabic
> words use the same font size as the English words on the same diagram, but
> they look a lot smaller to me. A friend of mine followed an Arabic course
> once and told me that sometimes the difference between two Arabic symbols
> can be very small, so I would assume that the font size is too small?
>
>  Also, the underlining of some objects hides a couple of the dots below some
> characters, would that be a problem for you? I'm using the standard
> underline feature of a Java JTextField for this, so it should be right, but
> it doesn't look right to me. Would you prefer more space between the word
> and its underline?

I get this comment quite often and I still don't know why the text,
despite the small size, is very readable for me and I didn't get
confused on any word. I guess, the human brain does not need to look
at individual letters but only a few and the general shape of the word
to recognise it. I'm sure this would be more problematic with
unfamiliar words like transliterated Latin names.

I would say, the text is very readable as is, but you may want to add
a font-sizing option to be on the safe side.

Keep up the nice work,

-Imed


--
Imed Chihi - عماد الشيحي
http://perso.hexabyte.tn/ichihi/