Boris Gorelik , Nabeel Sulieman
What we know Much of graph perception relies on conventions that seem standard and intuitive. One such convention is that numbers on a graph increase from the bottom up and from left to right. This left-to-right directionality agrees with the left-to-right writing systems used by most of the world's population. However, around 8% of the world uses right-to-left (RTL) scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew. Previous research has shown that RTL people perceive graphical information differently from their left-to-r
Nevertheless, no empirical study tests how this perception differs when an RTL reader sees a graph. Here, we present a study performed with English, Hebrew, and Arabic speakers in which we measured the RTL effect on visual perception. We also provide some guidelines to mitigate the challenges that we discovered.