Hi, community! I've scoured the posts for an answer, however, it seems like most people are asking how to remove the external link icon. I want to add it.

Our practice is to have any link that takes you outside Canvas open in a new tab. And for WCAG compliance, we also want to alert students about opening a new tab. Canvas automatically adding the external link icon for external links works great. 

My issue is when we use links that contain the same domain as our Canvas instance, like links to articles from our library. We consider these external links, but Canvas treats these as internal links, so they don't get the same "external link" treatment as a link to cnn.com would. 

We're currently manually adding the target and a title attribute (title="External Link") to cover WCAG, but I'd like these links to look the same as the other external links and have the icon and built-in compliance.

Does anyone know what triggers Canvas to recognize an external link vs. an internal one? How can I add this icon myself? 

Thanks for any help!