cmarshall - 12:12 am on Feb 15, 2007 (gmt 0)

I would say, probably, yes. I'll lay odds more modern blind readers do better, but maybe not. It probably depends upon their parsing engine. I suspect, that, like Web browsers, there are just a few basic ones that get redeployed.

SEO, probably yes, as well. This is because a word with a ligature character is, as far as the reader goes. I seriously doubt they would program their reader to equate the words. However, that may not be the case. I have a search system that uses metaphone(), and it ignored the difference between enye (ñ) and en (n).

So, I dunno.

UPDATE
I went back and did a bit more testing, and got inconsistent results. I noticed that when I deleted all instances of the enye from my DB, the search didn't match it and en. I think that maybe it was MySQL that was being so egalitarian.