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 ways that have nothing to do with the hardware underneath it. The script runs right to left, most letters change shape depending on what sits next to them, and one keycap can produce two characters in a single press. This page separates all of that from an actual fault — a switch that never reaches the browser, which the board above catches on its own regardless of language.
Layout match check: the fault a switch test cannot find
Set the input source to Arabic, then work along the eight home-row keys in order — شسيب on the left, تنمك on the right — comparing each cap's printed letter against the character that lands in the box. The switches underneath report identically no matter which input source is active, so a mismatch here means the operating system converted under the wrong one, never a hardware fault.
Two things are worth knowing before you read a mismatch as a fault. The caret moves the opposite way you might expect — Arabic is entered right to left, so each new letter is inserted to the left of what's already there, and the caret creeps leftward across the box as you type. That is normal, not a symptom of anything broken. And when you go on to report a mismatched key to someone else, name the letter or its underlying code point rather than describing how it looked on screen: با, بـ and ـب are the same letter in three different joined shapes, and describing the shape instead of the letter is the most common way a genuine layout fault and ordinary shaping end up confused in a bug report.
Right-to-left rendering test: joined shapes are not a fault
Type مرحبا into the box and watch it join as you go. Arabic letters carry up to four shapes — isolated, initial, medial and final — and which one renders depends entirely on the letters immediately beside it, never on the letter in isolation: م takes an initial form because a letter follows it, ر and ح take medial forms because letters sit on both sides, and the final ا closes the word. None of those four shapes is what the keycap prints — the cap always shows the isolated form — and all four are correct.
That distinction matters because "the keyboard types the wrong letter" and "the letter looks wrong" are different complaints with different causes. The layout match check above catches the first. The second is normal shaping almost every time it happens here — except when letters render as disconnected boxes or generic squares in the application you were actually typing into, which is a font on that page with no Arabic glyphs rather than anything wrong with the keyboard, since the same text renders correctly in this box.
The box is explicitly right-to-left, so if a word runs correctly here and backwards somewhere else, the fault is that other application's text direction rather than anything on your desk.
Reading the Arabic 101 board
Arabic prints 28 letters onto a board shaped for a 26-letter alphabet with room to spare for punctuation, so several letters take over keys a US board spends on brackets and symbols: ج and د replace the square brackets, ك and ط sit under the semicolon and apostrophe, و and ز take the comma and period, and ذ sits in the top-left corner where a US board prints the backquote.
One cap is not a letter at all. The key a US board prints as B sends لا — lam followed by alef, written as a single required ligature rather than two separate letters — so pressing it once adds two characters to whatever you're typing, and the character count in the rendering test above will legitimately run ahead of your keystrokes because of it.
The number row is a separate question from the letters. Arabic keyboards print Western digits, 0 through 9, on the caps, but Windows carries a regional "digit substitution" setting, independent of the keyboard layout, that decides whether apps respecting it render typed digits as those Western numerals or as Arabic-Indic digits — ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩ — instead. If the letters test correctly here but the digits look foreign somewhere else, that setting is worth checking before the keyboard.
Numpad test on an Arabic board
The numpad ignores everything above it: those keys always send the Western digits 0 through 9, because digit substitution only ever touches the top character row, never the numeric keypad. As for the rest of the board — its size, whether it's ANSI or ISO, Num Lock, and how many keys it can hold down at once — none of that changes for an Arabic layout, and the general keyboard tester walks through all of it in one place.
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.