What Can’t the Internet Handle in 2022? Apostrophes

While buying insurance, he said, “They asked me to confirm that my last name is indeed Stüvel.”

Well into the internet’s fourth decade, most everything is done online. Yet some names still stump machines. Computers can defeat

Garry Kasparov

at chess, but some systems stumble over names containing apostrophes, numbers, hyphens or letters not commonly used in English texts.

Names might be too long or too short for outdated technology or—as in Mr. Stüvel’s case—feature an umlaut, that double-dot doohickey over the vowel to signal a different articulation.

In the case of the flight, he phoned the airline, which figured out what had happened: one system had him down as “Stuvel”—the name the website forced him to book with—while another had him registered as “Stuevel,” the spelling on the machine-readable part of his passport. In this section, usually located on the bottom of a passport’s ID page, apostrophes are deleted, hyphens are turned into “

In the end, Mr. Stüvel made his flight as Mr. Stuevel—his new, unwanted second identity.

“I retweet a complaint at least five times a week,” said Miroslav Šedivý, a software engineer based in Vienna and the administrator of the plainly named

Twitter

account “Your Name Is Invalid.”

He gravitated to the topic after companies in Germany, where he formerly lived, literally gave him a bad name: they tended to lose the “Š” and the “ý” of his last name of Šedivý. He once tracked down a piece of mail addressed to “Miroslav Ediv.”

“The postman never threw it into my postbox,” he said. “He couldn’t match the names.”

The account curates a feed of similar battle stories.

“Hey Disney, let’s chat for a moment about names,” a user named Leah D’Andrea-Lee tweeted to

Walt Disney Co.

recently, saying the company repeatedly rejected her name when she tried to renew her Magic Key reservation pass for its Disneyland theme park. “What gives?”

Ms. D’Andrea-Lee and her husband Chris Lee are frequent Disney visitors and die-hard fans who won best in show for their cosplay at the “Mousequerade” contest at the official Disney fan club’s 2022 expo.

So it’s dispiriting, said the L.A.-based actor and costume maker, when she is addressed by one of the biggest media companies in the world as “LEAH DANDREALEE,” “Leah D&andrea” or, as her Magic Key came in the mail, the generic “Magic Key Holder.” (Her husband’s pass arrived addressed to his name.) Disney didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Among the frustrated are some Irish customers of the national carrier Aer Lingus, which ironically doesn’t accept names such as “O’Neill” and “O’Brien” when taking bookings.

Aer Lingus’s booking system, called Astral, is nearly 60 years old and doesn’t cater to special characters, an airline spokeswoman said.

“We recognize the limitations of the system with respect to accepting special characters and apologize to customers for any inconvenience caused,” she said. “As part of future systems development we will consider implementing reasonable steps to address this issue.”

Companies no longer have a technological reason to rebuff names on web forms, according to Mr. Šedivý. Today’s software can handle most characters from nearly every language through UTF-8, an encoding method defined by the worldwide online text standards group Unicode, Mr. Šedivý said. The World Wide Web Consortium, which establishes international standards for the web, gives guidance on structuring forms for varying dialects, he added.

Some companies bungle names because they still use an old system called ASCII, or the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which can encode a much smaller number of characters than UTF-8. Web designers are another source of the problem, said Addison Phillips, chair of the Internationalization Working Group at the web consortium.

Designers typically build web forms with certain implicit conditions (names must contain three or more characters, but no more than 10, for instance) to avoid spambots or inaccurate information from entering a database. But designers forget some names won’t meet those requirements, Mr. Phillips said.

“There is a tendency to be so immersed in your own culture that you become blind to the true range of variation in other cultures in the world,” he said.

Noëmi Aepli said systems struggle with the two dots—called a dieresis, which looks like an umlaut but has a different function—above the “e” in her name. A Ph.D. student at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, she is known among various databases as No& euml;mi, No??mi and Noë«mi.

Last month, she traveled to California for a six-month stint as a visiting student researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. The name on her new ID card? “No?mi.”

Ashleigh-Jayne O’Connell, a social-media manager based in Bedfordshire, England, said web forms also nix her name.

“I’ve got Ashleigh and Jayne—the Scottish spelling of both, hyphenated—and then the O’Connell with an apostrophe in there, too,” she said. After a denial, she’ll sometimes try her nickname, AJ. That can get vetoed for being too short.

“If what I’m signing up for is important, I bite the bullet, complain…and change my name,” Ms. O’Connell said. “But if it’s a case of something like an online shop, I just won’t use that company if they can’t accept my name.”

Letha Ch’ien’s parents began spelling her name “Chien” in elementary school because doctors could never find her medical records.

Dr. Ch’ien, an associate professor of art history and of Chinese descent, reclaimed the punctuation mark when getting her doctorate.

“I felt increasingly uncomfortable about living without the apostrophe,” she said. “Like I was conceding to a certain kind of ethnic erasure or forced assimilation through computer systems.”

Still, some websites balk at the apostrophe and spit out “invalid” error messages. She maintains a list tracking the various ways her name is spelled across her different accounts.

Some companies say they are making shifts to prevent such hassles.

FedEx Corp.

said it expects to add additional characters to its online forms.

A spokesman for

Intuit,

the parent of TurboTax and QuickBooks, said the company is aware some characters aren’t accepted in its online fields and is working toward a fix. The company earlier this year updated its error message to no longer refer to names with characters as “invalid.” Now, it reads “special characters are not allowed.”

Such tweaks might generate good will, said Alba Villamil, a user experience researcher and partner at consulting firm HmntyCntrd. “An error message should be an opportunity to communicate to your user that you, as the product, messed up,” she said, “not them.”

Write to Katie Deighton at [email protected]