Accented capitals: the French text-to-speech trap your keyboard sets for you
In French, an E that should be an É, or an A that should be an À, changes what a synthetic voice says. Why accents vanish on capitals, what a tool can safely fix on its own, and what you're better off telling it.
Look at the headlines on almost any French website and you'll notice something an English reader never has to think about: the capitals have lost their accents. "ELECTIONS", "ECONOMIE", "A LA UNE". A French reader restores them automatically, reading "élections", "économie", "à la une" without a flicker of hesitation. The trouble starts when the reader is no longer an eye but a synthetic voice. A voice doesn't guess. It says what is written, and what is written on a capital letter has usually shed its accent somewhere along the way.
If you're evaluating a French text-to-speech tool from outside France, this is one of those quirks that decides whether the audio sounds native or foreign, and it rarely appears in a demo. Worth understanding before you commit.
Why the accent disappears on capitals
It isn't carelessness. It's a habit as old as the typewriter. French keyboards don't offer the uppercase É, È or À directly, and for decades an informal typographic rule let people believe capitals simply weren't accented. The Académie française says the opposite: the accent carries full spelling value, capitals included. But habits outlast rules, and a large share of the French web is written in unaccented capitals, especially in titles, section headers and menus.
On the page, this costs nothing. The reader corrects it without noticing. Out loud, it costs plenty. "INTERNE" and "INTERNÉ" are two different words with two different pronunciations. "PECHE" could be fishing or a sin. "MEME" read literally comes out wrong. The wider question, the gap between text that is written and text that is spoken, is the whole subject of our page on French text-to-speech; accented capitals are a textbook case of it.
What a tool can safely fix, and why it fixes little
You'd want a good engine to just put the accents back everywhere, automatically. It's tempting, and it's dangerous, because many unaccented forms are already perfectly legitimate French words. "A" is a preposition as much as a verb form. "ou" (or) is a conjunction as much as "où" (where). "sur" (on) is as valid as "sûr" (sure), "du" as "dû", "la" as "là", "des" as "dès", "cote" as "côte", "tache" as "tâche". Putting an accent back at random on those isn't a fix, it's an error where there was none.
So our approach is deliberately cautious. Before the text reaches the voice, WeDispatch restores accents only on words whose unaccented form is never another French word: "ca" becomes "ça" (otherwise the voice said "ka va"), "francais" becomes "français", "eleve" becomes "élève", "tres" becomes "très". The list is the set of safe cases, and it stops where ambiguity begins. The genuinely ambiguous pairs above are never touched. When in doubt, we don't correct, the same rule that governs how we handle reading numbers aloud: a rule that's wrong one time in ten is worse than no rule at all.
The special case of all-caps words
That leaves one deliberate blind spot: words written entirely in capitals. WeDispatch does not re-accent them automatically, and that's a choice, not an oversight. A run of capitals can be a shouted word ("GRATUIT", free) or an acronym ("CA" for turnover, "OMS", "RATP"). Correcting "FRANCAIS" to "français" would be right; correcting "CA" to "ça" would be wrong. Since a machine can't reliably tell the word from the acronym, it holds back, the same trade-off we make with acronyms and initialisms: better not to decide than to decide badly.
In practice, a headline like "ELECTIONS 2026" is not re-accented on its own. Two answers exist, and both are in your hands rather than ours.
What you can do upstream
The first is the simplest and the best: accent your capitals at the source. "Élections 2026" reads correctly with no intervention at all, and it serves everyone, search engines and screen readers included. Most modern input methods can produce an uppercase É or À; it's a habit to build, not a technical hurdle.
The second, for a term that recurs and must always be said the same way, a section name, a brand, an in-house word, is to record it once in the pronunciation lexicon. The lexicon applies across the whole site and the whole newsroom: you settle the case once and it stays settled.
What we don't do, and why
We could force accents onto every capital and accept a few misreadings on acronyms. We don't. A voice that says "ça" instead of the acronym "CA" in a finance article makes an audible mistake, and that mistake is all the worse for being invisible to the person who wrote the text: they typed "CA", they never hear that the voice read something else. We'd rather fix the certain cases, leave the doubtful ones alone, and give you the means to decide for yourself when a word matters. Quality, to us, isn't guessing on your behalf. It's saying what's written accurately, and telling you plainly where your keyboard left us a gap to fill.
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