Adapting UsiXML User Interfaces to Cultural Background

Adapting a user interface to the end user's cultural background today remains an open challenge since many underlying issues are not yet solved. This paper addresses this challenge by reporting on a selected series of these issues, by structuring them according to Nielsen's linguistic model of interaction, and by discussing how each issue can be supported by incorporating its solution into a User Interface Description Language, such as User Interface eXtensible Markup Language (UsiXML), at the level of a Concrete User Interface (CUI). In particular, the problem of right-to-left (RTL) versus left-to-right languages (LTR) languages is discussed through a series of adaptations of algorithms and techniques that support the automated generation of Arabain graphical user interfaces based on UsiXML.