Provide a language choice on first login

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While Canvas allows the user to change their UI language after they are logged into Canvas, is there any facility to provide a language choice on first login?

Background:

My university changed the default system language to Swedish.

I have a course with hundreds of students of whom only a small fraction speak Swedish and the language used in the course is English, so I have set the Course language to English (US) to avoid the problem that many of the students would need to change language and of course, the UI to do that is only in Swedish.

Before changing the course language, I also placed a video, handouts, etc. on the front page for the course that includes instructions on how to change the UI from Swedish to the user's choice of language. Since the students can see this page when they go to the course - I had thought that this would address the problem.

However, setting the course language is not really in keeping with the university's goal of having English and Swedish as parallel languages. Nor well aligned with the user being able to change the language of their UI.

Note that some time ago (2018) I posted in the Canvas LMS community to see if others have dealt with this problem: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Question-Forum/How-to-set-the-correct-UI-language/td-p/142554

However, it seems that no one has addressed this problem.

Issue:

There remains the larger issue as noted above, is there a way that the user can choose their UI language on first login? Perhaps someone has added language choice to the login_form or via the signupDialog?

One local suggestion is to set the user's UI language when the user is created in Canvas - by adding user[locale] to the POST /api/v1/accounts/:account_id/users

However, this relies on the users' setting their preferred language in their profile (in the university's profile pages for users) before their Canvas account is created.

4 Comments
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Status changed to: Open
 
maguire
Community Champion

Toggling between two languages is described in the blog post: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Developers-Group/Toggling-between-two-languages/m-p/412192#M6576

 

maguire
Community Champion

The blog posting above has been updated to reflect the fact that the code has been updated to also automatically click on all of the tabs for the material in the selected UI language that are presented on a page using the deprecated jQueryUI tab mechanism. The code and document have both been updated at the github (shown earlier).

 

 

KristinL
Community Team
Community Team
Status changed to: Archived

Thank you for sharing this idea with the Instructure Community!

The Product Team reviewed all feature proposals recently, and unfortunately, this thread was identified as one that they would not be able to include in their current or future plans. While we appreciate your proposal, we also want to be transparent about the likelihood of something like this making it to production.

Thank you for collaborating, and we hope that you submit another idea in the future!