The Java sort doesn't ignore accents - it just considers them to be less significant than all the letters. Similarly, it doesn't ignore letter-case; that is compared only if everything else is the same.

It would be nice if the standard collators considered spaces equivalent - that's one thing that always annoys me in JEmplode. (Though it sometimes helps spot duplicates where one is mis-spaced, such as "Nightrider" appearing as "Night Rider" in some CDDB entry).