Right-to-left Software Development

At Steelkiwi, we have vast experience developing web and mobile solutions for the Middle Eastern market. We understand that RTL design is about more than a different text direction — it's also about different cultural patterns.

What can we do for you?

Check out our RTL software development services.

Market research & requirements engineering

A project can’t take off without clear requirements. To create them, we run discovery sessions to understand your target users and business goals, analyze existing competitors, and evaluate your project’s feasibility from the technical, operational, and legal perspectives. We then convert these requirements into a technical specification for our development team to follow.

RTL interface design

Designing right-to-left projects isn’t that easy and can be a real challenge, especially if a development team has no relevant experience. At Steelkiwi, we’ve built a variety of RTL projects for clients across business domains. In doing so, we’ve gained firsthand knowledge and established company standards for designing RTL products.

Web & mobile development

If you’re looking for end-to-end RTL software development services (including prototyping, design, development, and post-launch support), you’re in the right place. At Steelkiwi, we build web and mobile apps with flawless performance, great user interfaces, and security features.

Interface localization

Already have a left-to-right solution but want to expand to new markets? We can localize your solution so it’s relevant for a variety of languages and cultures, taking into account language standards, cultural peculiarities, and laws and regulations.

Talk to us about your RTL project

Have an idea for a bidirectional application? Drop us a line. We’d be happy to help!

Get in touch

Things we care about while developing RTL products

Layout

The main difference between left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL) languages is the direction of the content. RTL languages are written and read from right to left, just as the name suggests. This affects a platform’s entire structure. Armed with years of experience building RTL projects, we know how to create readable reverse layouts when moving from LTR to RTL and pay special attention to graphics, text, numbers, and symbols ─ all by taking into account cultural patterns and practices.

Mirroring

RTL software development is about more than just flipping everything compared to an LTR layout. Sometimes, flipping or mirroring isn’t even necessary. To determine if it is, we conduct user research, look into cultural patterns and communication norms, and interact with the client a lot to understand what elements should be mirrored and what elements shouldn’t. We also make sure an Arabic website isn’t just a copy of an English website and that mirrored content appears properly on the screen.

Typography

We give proper attention to typography and do our best to present the right message in the right way. Since Arabic characters are shorter and wider than Latin characters, they take up more space horizontally. To preserve readability, we resize fonts, refactor word length, and consider other space requirements.

Images, icons, and other visuals

There are differences in how different cultures perceive visual contents. When choosing or developing visuals for Arabic-based projects, we keep in mind social and cultural norms, the needs and values of target users, and best practices and standards for RTL websites and apps.