[ARCHIVED] Highlighter blocking out text

[cscheiner]

I am trying to annotate student paper submissions and the highlighter feature shows up as a solid block of color, obscuring the text. Any thoughts on how to fix it?

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Good afternoon,  @cscheiner  Welcome to the Canvas Community.  Thanks for posting your question.  I recall the issue you are experiencing now to have been an issue earlier this year, but it was my understanding that this had been fixed by Canvas engineers quite a while ago.  In my own testing, I logged into my sandbox course and tried to highlight some text on a document submitted by a "dummy" student (PDF document).  Unfortunatey, I was unable to recreate what you seem to be experiencing.  The yellow hightlights in this image are what I just tried:

Is your web browser up-to-date?  You'll want to make sure you are using either an up-to-date version of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.  You can read more about this by going to Which browsers does Canvas support?‌  Also, you can go to a website like What browser am I using? Is my browser up to date? to check the version of your web browser you're currently using.  If you are already using one of those two browsers, try the other one instead to see if that makes any difference.  Then, if none of those things help, I would recommend that you reach out to the folks at the Canvas Help Desk...as they might be able to provide some other things for you to try.  You can contact them by reviewing this Guide: How do I get help with Canvas as an instructor?

I hope this information will be of help to you, Corinne.  Please sing out if you have any other questions about this.  Thanks!

[cscheiner]

Thank you!

Corinne

[akerr1]

This issue is not fixed at all. Many people are still having it in Spring 2020. See the separate thread titled "Highlight Tool in SpeedGrader." (It might appear in the "Related Content" below.) Here's what I wrote in response to that thread:

"I've just started having the "opaque highlighter" problem too. It's not a highlighter anymore; it's a censor's pen! Exactly the opposite of what it should be!

I've used Canvas for many semesters, but this problem just started happening to me, even though my own setup hasn't changed recently. I'm using a MacBook Pro, Mac OS Sierra 10.12.6, Safari 12.1.2. The odd thing is, the highlighter is sometimes opaque and sometimes transparent; it varies from one document to the next. Argh! And I don't know how each individual student is seeing it on their end. I just don't trust the SpeedGrader interface at all anymore.

Needless to say, this is making my end-of-semester grading extremely difficult. I've resorted to using rectangular colored "boxes" instead, but that is very awkward too. (My institution doesn't have an easy way to submit automated help tickets for Canvas, and anyway, it's clearly not my institution's fault. Sounds like Canvas has already had multiple, multiple complaints about this, and they either don't know how to fix it, or they don't care enough.)"

[pkempe]

Definitely still a problem—I just posted this question also before seeing that others have too:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Question-Forum/Why-do-highlight-annotations-overwrite-redact-text... 

[jwr0015]

Why isn't there a control for color opacity in the Options drop down?