WCAG is part of EN 301 549 but EN 301 549 goes way beyond WCAG

We often read that Web Accessibility Directive refers to standard EN 301 549 that includes Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 on levels A and AA. But if we don’t actually check the whole EN 301 549 then we may think that it only includes WCAG and a bit more. The reality is that EC 301 549 includes a lot more of success criteria than WCAG as it needs to cover accessibility beyond web. It can also be applied to native mobile applications, documents and also other digital solutions.

In this post I present where EN 301 549 actually goes beyond WCAG and which parts of it are applicable for web and which for mobile. I think this can be of value for people not familiar with EN 301 549 that do know at least basics of WCAG. WAD in Norway is a bit simpler than in the rest of the EU, so I guess there are potentially a lot of people not aware of the whole EN 301 549 and I hope this post will shed some light on the whole standard.

43 out of 76 EN 301 549 success criteria are applicable to web and 32 to mobile applications alone

After processing all 76 EN 301 549 (version 3.2.1) success criteria I got to these numbers.

43 out of 76 success criteria that go beyond WCAG in EN 301 549 are applicable to websites and some of them also for mobile applications and other so called ICT technologies.

It’s important to understand what does ICT stand for:

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) : technology, equipment, or interconnected system or subsystem
of equipment for which the principal function is the creation, conversion, duplication, automatic acquisition, storage,
analysis, evaluation, manipulation, management, movement, control, display, switching, interchange, transmission,
reception, or broadcast of data or information

Definition of ICT from EN 301 549 (PDF, opens in new window).

The standard also includes examples of ICT, so to be totally clear about it:

Note: Examples of ICT are web pages, electronic content, telecommunications products, computers and
ancillary equipment, software including mobile applications, information kiosks and transaction
machines, videos, IT services, and multifunction office machines which copy, scan, and fax documents.

A brief note from the standard that provides examples of ICT.

So, as mentioned in the start EN 301 549 goes way beyond WCAG also in terms of technologies that are applicable. Besides webpages and mobile applications it can also be applied on hardware and that covers a lot more.

But let’s focus back on the web and mobile.

32 out of 76 success criteria that go beyond WCAG in EN 301 549 are applicable to mobile applications alone.

So, we have 43 success criteria that go beyond WCAG for web and 32 that go beyond WCAG for native mobile applications. That gives us almost double success criteria in theory.

Basically we can establish that EN 301 549 includes almost twice as much success criteria for web and mobile. A bit less for mobile, but still quite a lot. Of course not all success criteria are applicable for all webpages and mobile applications and in practical terms we don’t need to check all EN 301 549 on all webpages and mobile applications. But we still need to check if they apply before we can be certain.

To conclude I also provide the data that I got the numbers from. It’s based on latest version of EN 301 549 at the time of writing (version 3.2.1), to be clear about it.

And – please don’t forget to add WCAG to the rows to have the full overview. To not make my table even longer I decided to left out the 50 WCAG success criteria.