Through a little playing around, I figured it out: My Alt actually is a Meta key, in that it sets the high bit. Convert the resulting eight-bit value to UTF-8 a

Through a little playing around, I figured it out: My Alt actually is a Meta key, in that it sets the high bit. Convert the resulting eight-bit value to UTF-8 and you get the observed behavior: 'a' is 0x61 (0b01100001) and 'á' is U+00E1 (0b11100001) in Unicode.