Re: Text direction, CSS and accessibility

> Therefore would I be correct in deducting that there is no point in
> setting text direction using CSS [2] since it has to be set in the
> document using the dir attribute in order to be accessible?

My understanding is that it should very rarely need to be set in the
document as the use of Arabic Unicode characters should automatically
trigger the relevant direction change.

I'd caution, though, that few browsers can actually cope with right to
left text and you might need to give specific overrides if you start
with text as images.  (The last time I tried Mozilla it couldn't cope,
although I think this may have been with regard to the correct selection
of medial and final forms, rather than direction.)

Even IE doensn't support the style of Arabic script normally used for
Urdu, as far as I can recall; at one stage, this had to be hand written
in newspapers even though the other form could be typeset or typewritten.

Received on Sunday, 24 February 2002 04:14:00 UTC