How to reduce the darkening of banners

Question

I spent a lot of time constructing banners with images relevant to my courses.  The darkening covers almost the entire banner, obscuring my efforts to visually stimulate and engage learners.  I have to question whether techies who impose these kinds of changes actually consult educators.  The darkening should at least be adjustable to the area of text imposed.  My message: please consider carefully how students experience learning.  Find solutions that work for all students, disabled or not.

w011jar@wright.edu · Answer

Somehow I doubt the developers read these threads, but, on the off chance I'm wrong about that, let me echo the OP's sentiments. I, too, create custom banners for my course, because I feel like the randomly assigned ones are cute but largely irrelevant. In the past, this has not seemed to be a problem, but this semester, I was disheartened to see the image with a dark gradient toward the bottom and no way to shut that off, even if I remove the text from the banner altogether. To make matters worse, my banner happens to have black text near the bottom, so darkening the bottom makes the image LESS readable, not more accessible. Very discouraging when "features" like this one are added with no way to toggle them off. What the heck are y'all thinking?

Janet.O.779 · Answer

Hi, @William.B.467.

My guess is that this was actually an artistic decision made by visual designers (and implemented by the techies at their request), with the goal of making the image choices provided natively within Brightspace the most effective (shadow/shading to add depth). I can see how it doesn't work well at all with your own banner, though.

Have you reached out to your Brightspace site administrator? If they can't find a solution for you, they can post a question in the ASC Support Portal to see if D2L has a workaround to propose. I think it's worth asking this question through more effectual channels than just the Community's "ask a question" mechanism.

Just my 2 cents. Hope it's helpful in some way.