Why do webforms often refuse non-ASCII characters?

[Bríd-Áine Parnell]

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping someone can help me out with some information. I'm doing some research into the refusal of accents in names (and other multicultural naming conventions) in online webforms. For example, in Ireland, there was a campaign recently to get the government to mandate acceptance of the fada in Irish language names (Seán instead of Sean). The campaign was successful, and the law changed in 2022, but it's only a requirement for public bodies, companies do not have to comply.

During the campaign, reports were made to the Data Protection Commissioner on the right to rectify about some of the companies, including Bank of Ireland and Aer Lingus. They defended themselves by saying that their systems couldn't accept fadas in names.

I'm assuming that its systems on the back end, such as database systems, that can't accept the so-called special characters. My question is, why would this be, given that Unicode would seem to solve this, and modern databases can use Unicode? Does anyone understand what the value is in continuing to retain legacy systems that only accept ASCII or some ISO variants? Or is there a different problem happening?

Appreciate any information that might shed light on this.

Thanks,

Bríd-Áine Parnell

Doctoral Researcher | Designing Responsible Natural Language Processing

School of Informatics | Edinburgh Futures Institute
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. Is e buidheann carthannais a th' ann an Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann, clàraichte an Alba, àireamh clàraidh SC005336.
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