> The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy
That tells me you're German, I didn't even need to see the ä and ß.
Even in the UK I encounter websites that won't accept my Norwegian address because it begins with Å. English speaking countries generally are pretty bad at this sort of thing.
Just because we have æ, ø, å here in Norway doesn’t mean that we’re much better at handling “weird” characters from other countries than the English speaking countries are.
My Spanish girlfriend has an ñ in her last name, and as does our son. To the people here in Norway, I just tell them to put a plain n when typing the last name. It’s easier to just go with that than to try and get people to understand how to type ñ on the keyboard (even though our computers can do it), and to avoid extra back and forth with people who have systems that don’t handle it.
Likewise, when I’m in Spain I don’t bother to say that my last name has ø in it. I don’t even bother to rewrite the o in my last name as oe. I just put it as o.
The only situation where I put it as oe is indirectly when an airline converts ø to oe on my airline ticket, or where the airline system doesn’t handle ø and I put it as oe for them when making the booking. To me my name looks worse with oe in it, and seems harder to pronounce for people if I write it as having oe in it than just putting it as o.
I'm not talking about ordinary members of the public not bothering to figure out how to type an unusual character on a Norwegian keyboard. I have no idea how I would type a an n with a tilde, I would have to pick it from the character map.
My point was that someone who can type it will often have it rejected by a website. I was using a hotel booking site and when I booked a room it asked me for my address so I typed Å... The web page rendered it correctly but when I hit the button to complete the transaction it told me that my address contained an illegal character (or some similar wording). And this site handles bookings for hotels that themselves have names with umlauts, tildes, cedillas, etc.
Last time I tried to make an international transfer from my British bank account it couldn't accept destination names with any accented characters. An international transfer. Sheesh.
You'd think the UK would be alright with it given Irish names are and were reasonably common (at least in parts of the UK), which commonly have fadas in them (i.e. Béibhinn, Seán, Ciarán, etc)
I mean, English itself has diacritics in perfectly ordinary words that many Americans use every day (café, résumé, and yet somebody decided to put "useless" characters like @, ^ or # in ASCII instead.
^ comes from typewriters, where it was used to type letters like â by backing the caret and typing over the last letter. Similarly ' could be used for acute accent - hence why it didn't get a separate letter - and ` for grave accent.
By the way, the accents can often be used to force the right pronunciation of a foreign name on native speakers (at least in US, where Spanish names are so widespread). So e.g. use "á" if you want it to be pronounced [a] etc.
That tells me you're German, I didn't even need to see the ä and ß.
Even in the UK I encounter websites that won't accept my Norwegian address because it begins with Å. English speaking countries generally are pretty bad at this sort of thing.