The ComponentOrientation.getOrientation(Locale) method returns the desired orientation for a given locale. In many countries the desired orientation is more a user preference than a hard feature of the locale. For instance, Hebrew users will often want to run in a Hebrew locale in order to get Hebrew formats and other locale data and to work on Hebrew documents but want their UI to be primarily English/left-to-right. Our Hebrew customers in particular think this is extremely important.

There should be a user preference that can override the ComponentOrientation value that is returned by ComponentOrientation.getOrientation.