EN 301 549 vs. WCAG: what's the actual difference

If you've read an EU accessibility statement (including your own, if you have one) and noticed it cites both "EN 301 549" and "WCAG 2.1 Level AA" in the same sentence, that's not redundant or a mistake — it's how the two standards are actually meant to relate to each other.

WCAG is the web content standard; EN 301 549 is broader

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is a W3C standard specifically for web content — pages, apps, documents rendered in a browser. EN 301 549 is a European standard (formally, a harmonised standard under EU law) covering accessibility requirements for a much wider range of ICT: not just websites, but also mobile apps, hardware like self-service terminals and ticket machines, and other digital products and services covered by the EAA.

For the parts of EN 301 549 that deal with web content specifically, it incorporates WCAG by reference — Clause 9 of EN 301 549 essentially says "web content accessibility requirements = WCAG 2.1 Level AA," rather than writing a separate, competing set of web-specific rules. That's why the two names appear together: EN 301 549 is the legally-cited European standard, and WCAG 2.1 AA is the actual technical content it points to for websites.

Why this matters practically

For a typical consumer-facing website (not a physical ICT product like a ticket machine), meeting WCAG 2.1 AA is meeting the web-content-relevant part of EN 301 549. You're not doing two separate bodies of technical work — a scan that checks WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria is checking exactly what EN 301 549's web-content clause requires.

This is also why an accessibility statement correctly cites the harmonised standard (EN 301 549, with its specific version number) as the legal basis, while describing the actual technical work in WCAG terms — both are accurate, describing the same requirement from two angles: the legal citation and the technical content.

The version number matters

EN 301 549 is versioned, much like WCAG itself. The current version in force, V3.2.1, incorporates WCAG 2.1 AA. A future version — V4.1.1 is the one expected to incorporate WCAG 2.2 — will update that reference once formally adopted. Cluesia's own standards data is versioned the same way for exactly this reason: when the harmonised standard updates, what a scan checks for updates with it, without needing a platform rebuild.

Want to see the current version's full criteria list, organized by WCAG's four principles? See the full WCAG 2.1 AA breakdown, or check your website for free to see where you stand today.