Testers
Arabic Keyboard Tester
Test an Arabic keyboard in your browser. Check every switch, confirm the Arabic layout is live, and see whether letters join and run right to left.
Reads real keydown/keyup events and the characters they produce. Nothing you type is uploaded. Tab and Escape always keep their normal behaviour, so you're never stuck here.
- Last key
- —press any key
- Presses
- 0
- Keys tested
- 0 / 105
- Chattering
- None
- Largest rollover
- 0 keys
Layout match check
Press the eight home-row keys — this compares what each switch produced against the letter printed on it.
Rest your fingers on the home row and press شسيب and تنمك.
Right-to-left rendering test
Type مرحبا. Letters should join and run right to left — joined shapes differ from the keycaps, and that is correct.
Nothing typed yet.
Key log
Press any key to start.
An Arabic keyboard can look wrong in three different ways, and only one of them is a broken keyboard. A switch can be dead — the board above shows that. The layout can be set to English while the caps say Arabic. Or everything can be working and the letters simply do not look like the keycaps, because Arabic letters change shape as they join. This page separates the three.
Layout match check: the fault a switch test cannot find
Browsers report a keystroke through two independent signals: the physical
position of the switch, which never changes whatever language you type, and the
character your current layout produced from it. A keyboard tester that reads the
first is correct and useful — and completely blind to a layout problem. Press the
key marked ش with the input source set to English and the switch reports
perfectly, having produced a.
The layout match check reads both and compares them. Rest your fingers on the home row and press the eight keys under them — شسيب on the left, تنمك on the right. Each is listed with the letter printed on the cap and the character that actually arrived.
All eight matching means the Arabic layout is live. All eight arriving as Latin means the board is fine and the input source is English. A partial match usually means the layout changed part-way through, most often because a shortcut fired unnoticed.
Right-to-left rendering test: joined shapes are not a fault
Type مرحبا into the box and watch what happens. The text runs right to left, and the letters join: م takes an initial form, ر and ح connect through the middle, and the final ا closes the word. None of those shapes matches the isolated form printed on the keycap, and all of them are correct.
This is worth checking separately from the letters themselves because "the keyboard types the wrong letters" and "the letters look wrong" are different complaints. The first is a layout problem the check above will find. The second is usually the writing system behaving normally — and occasionally a font on the page you were typing into that has no Arabic glyphs, which shows as boxes or disconnected letters everywhere except here.
The box is explicitly right-to-left, so if text runs correctly here and backwards in your own application, the problem is that application's text direction rather than anything on your desk.
Reading the Arabic 101 board
Arabic has 28 letters plus the hamza forms, more than the Latin alphabet uses, so the arrangement takes over the punctuation keys: ج and د sit on the brackets, ك and ط on the semicolon and apostrophe, and و and ز on the comma and period. ذ takes the backquote position in the top-left corner.
One cap carries a ligature rather than a letter. The key a US board prints as B produces لا, the required joined form of lam followed by alef — one keystroke, two characters. That is the reason the character count in the rendering test can run ahead of the number of keys you pressed.
Numpad test and the rest of the board
Choose the size that matches the keyboard in front of you — full-size, tenkeyless, 75%, 65% or 60% — and the standard, ANSI or ISO. Arabic boards are sold in both shapes; the ISO one has an extra key beside the left Shift.
Work along each row rather than hunting for the key you already suspect. If a numpad key does nothing, check Num Lock first: with it off, those keys send Home, End and the arrows instead of digits, which looks exactly like a dead number pad. Hold three keys at once and watch whether all three stay lit — if one drops out, the keyboard's matrix is blocking that combination rather than anything on this page.
Questions
- Why does my Arabic keyboard type English letters?
- Because the keycaps and the operating system's active input source are two separate things, and only the second decides what a key produces. Arabic keyboards are dual-printed — Arabic in one colour, Latin in another, on the same cap — and Windows or macOS chooses which arrangement is live. With the input source set to English, every switch works perfectly and every switch produces a Latin letter, which is why an ordinary keyboard tester finds no fault at all. Use the layout match check here: press the eight home-row keys and it reports which character each switch actually produced against the letter printed on it. If they all come back Latin, nothing is broken and you need Alt+Shift, Win+Space or the language menu rather than a repair.
- Why do the Arabic letters look different from the keycaps?
- Because Arabic is cursive, and this is correct behaviour rather than a fault. Almost every Arabic letter has up to four shapes depending on where it sits in a word — isolated, at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end — and the browser joins them as you type. The cap prints the isolated shape, so pressing the key marked ب at the start of a word gives you بـ, a narrower form with a joining stroke. This is the single most common thing mistaken for a broken Arabic keyboard. The rendering test on this page shows what actually arrived, so you can see the shapes change as a word grows and confirm the letters are the ones you pressed.
- Why does the character count go up by two when I press one key?
- You pressed the lam-alef key. Arabic requires the sequence lam followed by alef to be written as a single joined ligature, لا, and the standard keyboard gives it a key of its own — the one a US board prints as B. It is one keystroke that produces two characters, so a count of what arrived will legitimately run ahead of a count of what you typed. That is worth knowing before you conclude the keyboard is repeating: a genuine repeat shows up in the key log as two separate presses of the same code, milliseconds apart, and the chattering readout flags it.
- Is my Arabic keyboard broken or is it a layout problem?
- Those are different faults with different evidence, and this page separates them. If a key stays pale on the board above when you press it, the browser never received an event for that switch at all — that is hardware, and the switch, the cable or a whole row is at fault. If every key lights up but the layout match check reports Latin characters, nothing is broken: the switches are reporting exactly as they should and the operating system is converting them under an English layout. The first needs a repair, the second needs a keyboard shortcut.
- Does this work for Persian and Urdu keyboards too?
- Partly, and the page is deliberately careful about the difference. Persian, Urdu, Pashto and Kurdish are all written in scripts derived from Arabic and share most of its characters, so the rendering test recognises them and reports correctly that Arabic-script characters arrived. The keyboard picture, though, shows the Arabic 101 arrangement specifically. Persian and Urdu keyboards add letters that Arabic does not have — پ, چ, گ, ژ among them — and place several others differently, so some caps here will not match a Persian or Urdu board. Everything on the page about switches, chattering and rollover still applies.
- Is anything I type sent to a server?
- No. Every keystroke and every character it produced is read and counted inside this page, and none of it is uploaded. That matters here because testing a layout means typing real words rather than tapping keys at random. All-time totals live in this browser's local storage, so clearing your browser data clears them. The site counts page views in aggregate, which the privacy page describes in full.