Students submitting transparent text (or white on white text) in discussions and text box submissions

[Choachy]

Our teachers have been reporting issues with student submissions where the text is 'invisible', and the issue for them is becoming more frequent. They are seeing this in SpeedGrader, on discussions, when students submit to essay questions, etc. Basically any text submitted from the RCE. 

Every chance we've had to investigate with the student, we discover they are using a browser extension that customizes the colors and appearance of Canvas. Rather than the standard theme, they have custom colors, backgrounds, headers, etc. 

See screenshots:

It appears these changes being made by the extension to override the CSS of Canvas, can also cause the text to be submitted using custom colors, and in some cases, it's causing it to be white text. The HTML of a discussion post where this happens shows <p><span style="color: #ffffff;">. 

Other than suggesting teachers highlight the text, or copy and paste the text to another program, and suggest students DO NOT use these extensions when submitting work or taking quizzes, what can we do to help the teachers in this case? Are we missing something that we can enable? Are others starting to see this and what are you doing?

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @Choachy ...

Not really a solution to your posting, but I wonder if students are using an extension for their browsers that is essentially providing them with a "dark mode" option for Canvas?  Dark mode is a frequent Canvas request for people here in the Community, but there isn't anything really built in to the core Canvas product to turn on a Dark Mode (at least, not for the Desktop experience).  So, people are coming up with other ways to have their own "dark mode", and so if they are typing text on a dark background, the text for these students would essentially be white or something close to it.

Although I completely understand the need/want for a "dark mode", you might need to let your students know what is happening and ask them to make sure they are posting using the proper text colors so that this doesn't continue to be an issue for you.

Hope this helps in some way.

[Choachy]

Yes, most of them are seeking some sort of dark mode. I don't blame them. I love dark mode too. But like you said, they don't realize the problems its causing. I didn't even go into the fact that some of these extensions have caused problems with them getting into a quiz using our proctoring software. 

We'll probably post a global announcement to try and warn them of potential issues. 

[wielandv1]

We've just seen an instance of this at our university, as well. It sounds like from our limited knowledge of it, that it might be iPad related in this case?