trensetim
commented
1 year ago Currently there are only the up/down arrows to have some kind of indication or order. However, they to not clearly state, how Text sorting is handled: With numbers it is pretty intuitive what up(asc) or down(desc) mean. With letters less so. As a starting point, A-to-Z and Z-to-A icons would be great for most european languages. But I can think of other languages with different characters in their alphabet. Such as Arabic, Kyrillic, Chinese or Japanese.
For some, maybe the notation of an order amongst characters isnt clear. Those may be left out, as english characters are a viable middle ground when in doubt.
One could argue that an application should show the icon depending on the users locale as european characters are hardly legible for some cultures.
As a different solution, I propose to at least add ascending/descending icons. Maybe in the form of progressivly higher/lower bars like in a bar chart. They would clearly convey the meaning of "sort/order". For many cultures they would be applicable even to sorting text. In contrast to the up/down arrays, those icons clearly mean "sort" and cannot be mistaken for "collapse/expand", "scroll back to top/bottom", "north/south" or other actions which are based on "direction"
the sortbyalpha icon isn't clear about direct and there's no sortbyzeta available right now