In education I've worked on several distinctive projects: an educational games portal for deaf and hard-of-hearing children, an online learning environment for sign-language math teachers built with WebRTC and Cordova, and a large portal for cultural, scientific, and sustainability education offerings for schools. Three very different projects, but always with the same thread: technology only matters when it tangibly improves learning.
On the reading-game portal, accessibility was central. We aimed for WCAG A++, so all interaction had to be workable with keyboard, screen reader, and varying input devices. Animations, sounds, and visual feedback were deliberately supportive and never blocking. That forced sharper choices in markup, focus management, and component design than in an average project — and produced an immediately visible result for the audience.
The teacher learning environment for sign-language education combined Angular with WebRTC for video and audio communication and Cordova for multi-platform deployment. WebRTC has plenty of power but also sharp edges — NAT traversal, codecs, fallback paths, browser differences — so we deliberately invested first in a solid connection base with clear feedback when something doesn't work.
On the cultural/scientific education portal, the challenge was more in the data architecture and in taking over an existing Silverstripe system. We centralised CMS management across all subsites, routed evaluations between schools and providers in a targeted way, and applied a brand-new visual design without having to rebuild everything — so the portal didn't lose a day of availability for schools.
What characterizes education as a sector is that the end users — pupils, teachers, school leaders — are often not primarily technical. An interface has to do the right thing on its own, across very different devices, sometimes on an unstable school connection. Simplicity, readability, and predictability matter more here than almost anywhere else.
For me this is a sector to work in with pleasure. Every time a child completes a game and moves another step forward in reading, or a teacher can give a colleague feedback more easily, that's a direct justification for every effort poured into accessibility and user experience.