Eventually I'd like to know how to use foreign characters with the impact font engine, but right now I'm not even able to get regular HTML text to display correctly. When I use .innerHTML, the accents do not appear as expected.

I read this:
If your HTML/Javascript code files are created so they use Unicode, you should be able to put the ô and é characters in your Javascript and HTML with no problems.

But am not sure how to encode Impact so that I can use accents in my strings and have them appear in .innerHMTL

I can write
hôtel

to get hôtel, but it's not ideal to write a bunch of messages in code form.