Formatting of Arabic and English text in courses and student submissions

[GemmaWestwood]

I have a query from an academic colleague regarding the formatting of Arabic and English text on the same page. Currently, there is no way to format this correctly (other than using the HTML) when both scripts appear on the same page.

Although HTML is an option for more tech-savvy academics this presents a problem for those who are not confident with HTML and for students who wish to submit multi-lingual text responses to assignments (should they not wish to upload a document) or within discussion forums.

Additionally, the embedded immersive reader is not able to switch between Arabic and English when reading aloud. (however, I suspect that this is more of an issue with the way that speech recognition is set up within Windows as you can only run one speech-language pack at a time)

Does any one have any non - HTML suggestions that will support students and academics using multiple different language scripts, specifically those that switch from a left to right reading direction to a right to left reading direction?

Also will Canvas be looking into this any time soon as i am sure that other's working in language departments would find a non HTML based feature for this useful.

[James]

@GemmaWestwood 

I am going to claim ignorance on the use of non-English languages, so I am not sure if this is helpful or not.

Switching the direction of the text does not require editing HTML. From the Rich Content Editor menu, go to the Format menu, choose Direction, and there you can set left to right and right to left.

This adds a dir="rtl" attribute to the paragraph containing the cursor. If you hit enter to start a new paragraph, it remembers the direction setting. This allows you to have both left to right and right to left text on the same page without editing HTML.

The menu does not have an option to add a language attribute, though. For that, you can edit the HTML and add lang="ar" to the paragraph. As with the dir attribute, the lang attribute is copied when you start a new paragraph.

I do not think that will fix the issue with the immersive reader, but I am not an expert there. I went to Google Translate and created some Arabic text. Then I copy/pasted it into a paragraph with dir="rtl" and lang="ar" attributes. When I asked the immersive reader to read it, it skipped it completely.