It seems that the ability for instructors to rotate submissions and then annotate the work has been removed from the SpeedGrader. This is an important workflow for faculty. While they can "require" students to submit work in the proper orientation, the students can not preview the orientation of their work upon submission. Why would you even have a rotation option in the annotation space if you weren't going to then allow the faculty to annotate the properly oriented work?
I'll second this - we just had an instructor asking about this today.
Thankful for your post since I have attempted to report this issue/concern to support with no success. Although we are not currently using the upgraded SpeedGrader in our instance, your post in this group seemed to be the same issue we are encountering in 'classic' SpeedGrader
I reached out to Instructure Support back in Dec. 2025 after faculty contacted me about the issue of 1) rotated submissions not remaining static in SpeedGrader and 2) inability to add annotations after submissions were rotated.
Two reps stated that this was "intended behavior," and I was pointed to this guide with "Pages with annotations cannot be rotated" highlighted.
I explained that I was aware that annotated submissions could not be rotated and reiterated the issues. I shared that the faculty members who reported the issues were seasoned Canvas users, and I also provided a screen recording of the behavior.
The reply to this was "When a document is rotated, annotations are not allowed to ensure they don’t get messed up when the rotation is reset. So to prevent it from ever getting that we it is currently limited to only be annotated in the direction they are uploaded in."
The ticket never left L1 support.
@james_whalley and @jmerlenbach2
YasiAfsharnive posted today in Performance and Usability Upgrades for SpeedGrader Goes to General Availability In January! that the issue is related to DocViewer and not SpeedGrader after this issue was brought up in that blog. She's informed the relevant team and will provide updates.
@AFurr I would push back on your ticket. I have had to push back over and over, taken this to our CSM, and am ready to escalate it higher if something is not done soon.
Instructure developed the DocViewer to allow rotation and annotation — the rotation to fix the common problem of improperly oriented submissions and annotation for a key feedback function. They then made changes when they realized that allowing any user with access to a submission to rotate it for everyone. Their fix then caused an issue where annotations were sometimes not properly oriented for some users. Their fix then removed the originally designed functions of rotate and then annotate.
It seems that we have lost the functionality because they have made bad decisions in their design of the tool. It is not impossible to fix though — they just need to be willing to fix a problem they created.
I know this group is wrapping up, but it would appear I have nowhere else to complain. Teaching an online course where a good deal of their work is turned in by scan+upload, and a third of student work is rotated incorrectly, losing this feature is shockingly disruptive. This would be worth quitting Canvas over if I had any choice about what LMS we use on our campus.
Hi all! We understand the issue and have shared this feedback with the relevant team. I hope to have an update on this soon.
There is a fix in beta right now. Please get in and test out your workflows to see if anything is still not working.
@james_whalley Although users can rotate and annotate now, there's an issue with old annotations no longer appearing. I found a few examples in my courses. Instructure needs to make sure old annotations are preserved before releasing this to production. I'm glad they're working on making this functionality available though!
@kailey Thanks for the heads up! This is why I like the Community — we can come together and share what we learn. Did you report that back to Instructure? During my testing, I found that I could not see any new annotations I make when going back in as a student. None of my colleagues can replicate it, so I assume I need an update or a cookie clearance.
@james_whalley Hm, I wanted to go in and test to confirm whether students can see newly added annotations after rotating the file, but it seems like the feature is no longer on Beta. I originally tested on Friday, so maybe Instructure didn't re-release the code after the weekend's refresh.
@kailey I just learned that annotations do not carry over to Beta or Test.
@james_whalley Thanks for sharing! That's interesting because my CSM had asked me specifically to find and confirm whether old annotations appear as expected in Beta after they deployed the code for supporting the ability to rotate then annotate in Beta. I just sent an email to ask her to confirm what the expected behavior is. She reached out to the PM. I'll let you know when I hear back. Thanks again!
@james_whalley CSM just confirmed annotations do not carry over to Beta, which makes me wonder why the CSM and Support both asked to confirm whether old annotations still appeared when they knew the answer 🤔 Thanks for sharing!
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