Those are two different characters. They are not interchangeable. It looks like the guy's name is Anton, a Swedish name. Thus he will create names with "å"-s in them if he wants to.
Will this cause any problems? It might. That still does not mean that "a" is a proper substitute for "å".
Should he have tried making a name from just English letters? That might have been a good idea. But that is a different recommendation than the one you gave.
"STARGÅTE", on the other hand, is an example of gratuitous replacement of "A" by "Å".
Å and A are not at all the same letter. Although I agree that using characters outside of the ascii set for naming projects on the internet is probably a bad idea. If I had to translitterate Ålenkå to Latin chars, it would probably be Oolenko, but even that's not really that close. The Latin alphabet has a horribly limited set of vowels.
The transliteration of Å is usually "AA". In fact the "circle" above the A is really a lower case "a". It's just that as time passed, it "devolved" into a circle.
I always thought it was "oa". As in boat vs båt (the swedish word for boat). It is pronounced kinda like "oa", essentially a big round long "o" sound with the mouth muscles relaxing just before the sound is completed, making an OOO-a sound.
Yep, perfectly typable. Though I did have to look up the deadkey for ˚ as it's not a diacritic I use often (Option-K on the Mac OS X US Extended keymap; on Windows or Linux US International keymaps you can do it without a deadkey as Right-Alt W, or on the Mac US keymap as Option-A).
I highly recommend that people use and learn the "extended" or "international" keymaps on their system, so they can learn how to type these sorts of characters easily. As more and more systems are Unicode enabled, and you interact with more people internationally who would prefer their names to be spelled properly, it's a useful skill to have (and doesn't really take much work).
I wouldn't say it's related in any way to the alphabet in use. Take the English 'a' as an example: skate and car produce two different sounds out of the same letter.
Many alphabets do a good job transmitting sounds. Spanish, French or German are easy to read. English is particularly bad at having any correlation between spelling and pronunciation. "Spelling bee" would make little sense in most languages.
Sure, but F and E and completely different letters, even if they are almost identical (except for the little bar at the base of the E that is missing on the F).
A and Å are different letters, and can't be substituted for each other.
There are languages with true alphabets, ie. there is a one-to-one relation with written letters and sounds. A good example is Turkish. Once you learn the sounds of the 29 letters in the alphabet, you can perfectly pronounce all Turkish words.
