Standard
EN 301 549
EN 301 549 is the European harmonised standard that specifies functional accessibility requirements for information and communication technology (ICT) products and services. It is published jointly by the three European Standardization Organisations — CEN, CENELEC, and ETSI. The version in force at the time of writing is EN 301 549 V3.2.1, published in March 2021, which incorporates the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level A and AA success criteria and applies them across web content, non-web documents, and software.
The standard exists to give European public procurement and legislation a single, testable technical baseline for accessibility. It is structured into clauses covering generic requirements, functional performance statements, and technology-specific chapters. For document accessibility, Chapter 10 ("Non-web documents") is the relevant section: it maps WCAG success criteria onto electronic documents such as PDF, word-processing files, spreadsheets, and presentations — requiring properly tagged structure, text alternatives for non-text content, meaningful sequence and reading order, an identified document language, and accessible forms and tables. Chapter 9 covers web content and Chapter 11 covers software, all sharing a common WCAG-derived core.
EN 301 549 matters because it is the standard cited by EU accessibility legislation, including the Web Accessibility Directive for public-sector bodies and the European Accessibility Act. Where a harmonised version is cited in the Official Journal of the European Union, meeting its relevant clauses can confer a "presumption of conformity" with the corresponding legal requirements, within the scope the standard defines. Because it is drafted as testable requirements rather than legal text, it also functions as an implementation and evaluation reference, with described test procedures for procurement and conformity assessment. For a PDF, EN 301 549 does not invent new criteria — it points to WCAG-equivalent expectations adapted to the non-web context, so a well-tagged, correctly ordered, richly described document tends to align with its Chapter 10 requirements.
How Normfluss checks for it
Normfluss evaluates a document against the WCAG-derived expectations reflected in EN 301 549 Chapter 10 — tag structure, logical reading order, text alternatives, a declared document language, and correctly marked headings, lists, and tables. Results are reported as conformance within a stated scope (the automatable subset of criteria), never as a legal determination. Items that require human judgement, such as whether alt text is meaningful, are flagged for manual review rather than asserted as passed.