That doesn't work outside America, where accents are often retained (café, façade, naïve) and £ or € is often needed.

I'm OK with that. I'm in the U.S., and I comprehend my non-American English-speaking colleagues, but I don't try to be like them. The same should go the other way around. We're NOT going to standardize on one of the flavors of English -- variety is good.

Recognize, however, that it does annoy those of us outside America when something very straightforward — like the ö in my friend's name, or writing £ — doesn't work. Imagine moving to a hypothetical country with no letter C, and being told your name "must" be kryptonektor, or instead seeing %ryptone%tor.

It's fairly common for a lot of computer software to standardize on American English and American conventions, yet several of these are unique to under 1% of the world's population. This morning, a new installation of Microsoft Outlook asked for a location and timezone, yet still showed the weather for Washington DC in Fahrenheit above the calendar. The weather location was easily changed, but not the units. A well-known messaging app I installed last week shows my location as "K%©benhavn", for someone in Russia no character in the location is intelligible. A receipt from a restaurant in Europe has only about a 95% chance of correctly showing €, and maybe a 1/50 chance of showing the date in the wrong order. On an international flight between two non-English places, it's fairly common for the in-flight display to show miles and Fahrenheit with English, which I don't understand, and kilometres and Celsius with (say) Arabic, which I can't understand either — along with the other 99% of non-American connecting passengers.

I have no issue with the minor spelling differences and changes of idiom.

So yes, we mostly understand the Americans, except their measuring units and paper sizes.

> The same should go the other way around.

But it often doesn't.

Here in New Mexico ñ is very common in place names. And I’ve known people with accented names who, though they don’t insist on it, appreciate (sometimes visibly brightening) when their names are spelled accurately.

My own name has an accent. I am always surprised when someone gets that right, but I don't insist on it.