I'm a native English speaker who's very exposed to French, but doesn't speak it, I find the use of accents in French very welcome to getting the pronunciation right when exposed to a new word. English is just a mess in comparison and I wish it had made use of accents as well to avoid a lot of the ambiguities in pronunciation. Perhaps some of the old English letters that are no longer in use helped a bit, but I'm not familiar enough with those to know if it used to be better.