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Four ways to find Arabic defects

No products are named here. A table of other companies' capabilities is a table of claims we cannot verify, and the question a buyer actually has is which kind of check to run. Two of the four below are not alternatives to this one: run them as well.

A bilingual tester, by hand

Somebody who reads Arabic opens the product and writes down what is wrong.

Catches

  • Tone, register and whether a translation is actually idiomatic
  • Anything that needs judgement about meaning
  • Defects in flows a crawler cannot reach, behind a login or a payment

Misses

  • Repeatability. A second pass is a second opinion, not a diff
  • Breadth. Every page, every width, every release is more hours
  • Mechanism. It finds that something looks wrong, rarely which rule and which selector

Best for: Judging whether Arabic copy is good. No tool decides that, and a scan that said otherwise would be lying.

A general accessibility scanner

An automated pass for contrast, labels, landmarks and structural accessibility.

Catches

  • Contrast, alternative text, form labelling, heading structure
  • Regressions in all of the above, on every build, for free

Misses

  • Direction. A page laid out left to right is not an accessibility failure and will not be reported as one
  • Bidirectional text. Mixed Arabic and Latin runs, neutral characters resolving the wrong way, numerals inside a right to left line
  • Arabic typography. A face with no Arabic coverage falls back silently and the page still passes
  • Untranslated strings, which are structurally perfect and semantically wrong

Best for: Accessibility, which is a different job. Run one. It is not in competition with this and every site should have both.

Localisation QA tooling

Checks over the translation pipeline: missing keys, placeholder mismatches, string length budgets.

Catches

  • Untranslated and stale keys before they ship
  • Broken interpolation and plural forms
  • Strings that will overflow a known budget

Misses

  • Everything that happens after the string reaches the page: the CSS that positions it, the font that renders it, the direction it inherits
  • Text that is not in the pipeline at all, which is most of a third-party widget
  • Whether the rendered result is readable, as opposed to whether the input was complete

Best for: Catching translation problems at the source, which is earlier and cheaper than catching them on the page. Also not in competition with this.

Ritla

this is us

Deterministic checks on the rendered Arabic page, with a screenshot, a selector and a fix for each finding.

Catches

  • Direction and bidi defects in the rendered result, not in the source
  • Physical CSS that will not mirror, per property and per selector
  • Arabic typography: missing coverage, silent fallback, tracking applied to a connected script
  • Untranslated content on a page that is otherwise Arabic
  • Overflow and clipping per breakpoint, because Arabic runs longer
  • The same defects again after a release, with a diff rather than a second opinion

Misses

  • Whether the Arabic is any good. It checks the rendering, never the writing
  • Anything behind a login, a payment step or a bot check
  • Design intent. An asymmetry on purpose and an asymmetry by accident look identical to a rule, which is why the declines list exists

Best for: Proving an Arabic product renders correctly, repeatably, with evidence a client or a developer can act on without a meeting.

The short answer

If you need to know whether your Arabic reads well, hire somebody who reads Arabic. If you need to know whether it renders correctly, on every page, at every width, again after the next release, and with evidence somebody can act on without a meeting, that is this. Most teams shipping Arabic seriously need both, and the scan is the cheaper half to start with because it costs nothing to try.