How to stop iPad from text translation on website?

Question

I'm pretty sure the answer is a simple "no", but ask anyway. I work in the education field. My colleagues are foreign language teachers and they use Canvas LMS. All students have one-to-one iPads. Students know they can highlight a word and click "Translate" to translate the word, and they often take advantage of this to cheat. The best solution currently is to create the questions as text images so students can't highlight the words, but this is cumbersome and the text doesn't wrap properly on different screens when the text is an image, so most teachers give up this method. Some people use monitoring software to try to catch students who cheat. Some people use paper exams. There are obvious solutions here. I'm looking for a solution that allows students to use their iPads without the teacher having to worry about translations. Completely disabling or removing the built-in translation app is not a good solution as students may need the app for other courses or for personal reasons.

I followed the advice on this post: How to disable Google Translate in HTML in Chrome. Very cool. Adding class="notranslate" or lang="en" class="notranslate" translate="no" to various tags works well to disable Chrome on Windows devices translate. However, on the iPad it doesn't work, the built-in translation app doesn't seem to care about HTML attributes. Are there any other HTML tips and tricks I can try to prevent the iPad from translating specific text, or is this a hopeless thing?

Answer 1

Assuming you have access to the custom theme editor, you should be able to make things unclickable. Pointer-events:none will work, but you will need to add a class for each item that you don't want to be translated. This may also impact the accessibility of your course.

By the way, I'm the Custom Course Lead at Canvas and I've seen some great examples done by our Spanish team. I learned that if students feel pressured to cheat, making such modifications to technology will only slow them down. You may consider modifying your course so that it is not affected by translation. I'd be happy to discuss specific alternatives from this perspective.