Use RTL (Right to Left) Languages in SwiftUI

Written by Team Kodeco

In today’s interconnected world, it’s crucial to make your app accessible to a broad spectrum of users. This includes those who utilize languages read from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew. SwiftUI provides the flexibility to accommodate text and UI elements for RTL languages seamlessly.

Let’s explore this with an example where we’ll allow users to toggle between right-to-left and left-to-right layouts. You’ll implement a toggle switch for the layout direction, which will be applied to a stack of text views.

struct ContentView: View {
  @State private var isRTL = false

  var body: some View {
    VStack {
      Toggle("Right-to-Left", isOn: $isRTL)
        .padding()

      HStack(alignment: .top) {
        VStack(alignment: .leading) {
          Text("مرحبا العالم") // Arabic for "Hello, World"
          Text("שלום עולם") // Hebrew for "Hello, World"
        }
        Spacer()
        Text("Hello World!")
      }
      .frame(maxWidth: .infinity)
      .padding()
      .environment(\.layoutDirection, isRTL ? .rightToLeft : .leftToRight)
    }
  }
}

Here’s what your preview should look like:

In this example, isRTL is a state variable controlled by a Toggle view. The layout direction of the HStack changes to either .rightToLeft or .leftToRight based on this state variable. The HStack encapsulates two Text views featuring phrases in Arabic and Hebrew and an English phrase on the right side. Users can observe the text layout transition between RTL and LTR modes when they engage the toggle.

Remember, not all UI elements might inherently support RTL layouts. Therefore, testing your application with RTL languages to verify appropriate behavior is imperative. This can be achieved by setting the language and region format in the scheme settings of your Xcode project, or using a device or emulator that supports RTL languages.

In conclusion, catering to RTL languages in your application is a significant stride towards achieving accessibility and usability for a wider audience. SwiftUI simplifies the process of enabling your application to accommodate users who read from right to left.