Entrust Product Design Chief Mark Opland Talks the European Accessibility Act, More in Interview
A couple of weeks ago, a landmark law spearheaded by the European Commission went into effect. It’s called the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and it mandates digital goods be accessible to people with disabilities. The June 28, 2025 timeframe was the cutoff date for member states in the European Union to reach compliance, but the law was officially passed back in 2019. The deadline was imposed so as to achieve synchronicity concerning digital accessibility spanning the European Union. Companies whose products shipped to customers prior to June 28 have a grace period of 5 years to comply with the EAA. Hardware has double the time, with 10 years’ grace.
A cogent primer on the EAA was posted in late January on the AccessibleEU website.
One company that’s been thinking a lot about the EAA is Entrust. A digital identify firm based in the United Kingdom, Entrust offers a suite of products and services which cater to financial institutions like banks. Entrust builds everything from ID verification technology to encryption tech and more. In an interview conducted last week via videoconference, Entrust’s vice president of product design, Mark Opland, encapsulated his company’s scope as “[offering] an enormous amount of products and services to financial institutions, but really centered around identity and security.”
When asked about why accessibility matters to him and his team, Opland explained it has been “a huge part of the way we’ve built products for a long time,” adding accessibility has been personally pertinent for the better part of 15 years. To raise awareness for accessibility, he told me, not only aligns with his value system, but helps Entrust “deliver more successful products and services into the industry.” Accessibility, Opland went on to say, isn’t viewed as a “constraint” for Entrust; rather, the company views it as an opportunity to innovate and thus better build its business. Accessibility can be, and often proves to be, “an enabler of innovation” for Entrust, Opland said.
“If we fundamentally approach design problems and product problems thinking about the largest possible user base in mind, we ultimately build products that are more successful,” he said of Entrust’s philosophy on prioritizing accessibility in its work.
As to the EAA, Opland said the legislation is a directive aimed at “[making] a wide range of products and services more accessible to people with disabilities,” adding the European Union considered the things people used day-to-day in an effort to contribute to the betterment of society and wanted to find a way to “[encourage] greater inclusion and breaking down the barriers across the European Union for all people.” The EAA, he continued, touches myriad industries and, as such, while compliance to the EAA is compulsory, the byproduct of it is what Opland characterized as enabling businesses to “tap into a much larger customer base.” He pointed to a large bank in the United Kingdom who reported its total addressable market increases by more than 10% when they build products with accessibility in mind. “For the European Accessibility Act and the European Union, it’s not only about providing access, but about building their GDP and increasing the [gross domestic product] for all their member states,” Opland said.
For Entrust’s part, Opland made crystal clear his main job as it relates to the EAA is to ensure the company enters into, and then maintains, compliance with the law. Entrust must follow the law’s legal structure and, more pointedly, “we can’t be building and shipping products anymore that are not accessible.” Opland was forthright in telling me he cares not about being the “accessibility police” and running around into people’s offices internally to enforce abiding by the EAA. Instead, he told me the company has spent lots of time leading up to last month’s deadline auditing and doing remediation. Moreover, Entrust has focused its energies on prioritizing advocacy and evangelism with the goal of what Opland said is “building a culture of continuous improvement.”
“Our goal is to make sure every team at Entrust, whether it’s Human Resources or an engineering team, is focused on making sure they’re better this quarter than they were the last quarter and better next quarter than they were this quarter,” Opland said. “That advocacy has us out of the cycle of managing accessibility from audit to audit, and seeing the job is being done when we earn our accessibility accreditation. This focus on continuous improvement means it’s top of mind for everyone in the company and has now become part of our DNA… that’s been the secret to our success over time.”
Opland acknowledged coming into compliance with any sort of law has its challenges, but in context of the EAA, the economic and social benefits can make the headaches worth it. Especially from a social justice perspective, he said “it’s been fantastic” to work with the law at Entrust because it aligns with both his personal and the company’s institutional values. The main theme that threaded my conversation with Opland is that greater accessibility vis-a-vis the EAA is two-pronged: it benefits people obviously, but it also benefits businesses. The more people one markets to, the bigger its bottom line can become. Understanding those principles takes education, and Opland told me it can be challenging unto itself to teach people how to make accessibility happen. The EAA, as a law, and accessibility standards like WCAG aren’t necessarily congruent with one another; Opland said they “aren’t always black and white… in some places they’re gray.” Entrust understands “there’s always a tradeoff between usability and security,” according to Opland, which isn’t always a question with a black-and-white answer.
“What we’ve discovered is the more you have those conversations, the more you dig in and the more you learn, the stronger and more resilient you become,” Opland said of the company’s learnings. “Accessibility is a unique challenge in that there is often quite a lot of subjectivity and just a huge spectrum in human ability. There isn’t just sort of a one-size-fits-all solution that’s going to allow me to wave a magic wand to make everything accessible. I think it’s just a constant cycle of learning and improving.”
Entrust has been working on accessibility for close to a decade, or 9 years, now. This gave Opland and team a lot of runway in terms of comfort and confidence when the company felt the looming EAA deadline. The work on compliance, he told me, had been an 18-month effort into understanding EN 301–549—which is linked to the EAA—WCAG, and the EAA itself. Companies like Entrust who are generally concerned with the aforementioned WCAG standards, Opland told me, are “in a really good position to be compliant with the law with the exception of a few slightly more specific directives.”
“If you’ve been focused on WCAG, you set yourself up really well,” Opland said. “We’ve had a pretty big head start and have been positioned pretty well to be compliant.”
Opland is optimistic the EAA will help make accessibility more top of mind and more present in products. The European Union, he told me, has set a standard because to EAA applies to anybody who wants to do business in the Union, so products and websites must meet the new regulation. In the United States, Opland pointed to the Americans with Disabilities Act as greatly improving the quality of life for the disability community, but conceded there is more work yet to be done. He hopes businesses everywhere “continue to invest” in accessibility for the people—and for their business.
As to the future, Opland and Entrust are committed to walking the righteous path.
“Our hope is we are continuing to build products and services that enable more and more people to enact with their communities, to enact with the businesses around them, [and] to have more opportunities and greater advantages in the lives they lead,” he said of Entrust’s view of its future work. “There’s something really meaningful and deep in doing so. Identity is such a great vehicle to help advance underrepresented folks in all stations of life, and accessibility is one important aspect of that. If you track back to Entrust’s mission, it perfectly aligns with our mission. It perfectly aligns with our growth as a business. We were working on [accessibility] long before the law mandated we do it. We’ll continue to invest in accessibility, whether the law continues to mandate it, so it just aligns perfectly with our mission, with our values, and with our business.”
