MySQL accent insensitive word search
A Google of "mysql accent insensitive search" produces various links with various "tricks" - which all seem to invalidate any indexes you may have on your table. 

I had to implement something similar years ago for Irish names and addresses which may contain accents. 

The strategy (if your RDBMS doesn't support accent insensitive searches) is to use a shadow column which keeps track of a "base" word - in our case unaccented, capitalised and spaces removed so that when a record with the name:

name_display
Ronán Ó Sé 


is INSERTed (or UPDATEd), what will be stored as

name_shadow
RONANOSE


and then all searches are made against the shadow column. 

In the app, we capitalised, and removed accents and spaces from all search strings when sending them to the server, so that the search was comparing like with like - i.e. unaccented, capitalised, space-removed strings. 

This had the dual advantage of being always able to use indexes and being portable across RDBMS servers. Being an Irish app, we also had a strategem turning Mac and Mc into MC so that variant spellings were also taken into account - maybe an issue for you also?

We did this using TRIGGERs - but I believe that as of MySQL 5.7, GENERATED (also known as VIRTUAL or COMPUTED) columns are supported which may simplify the logic?