Not so much. French tends to have words that are pronounced the same but are written differently thanks to all the silent letters and combinations that are pronounced the same:
vers, verre, vert.
mer, mère, maire.
In writing you can usually do away with all the accents (many of them are grammatical or the strictly correct spelling but without changing the pronunciation and with little change of the 'look' of the word) without problems.
The only “important” accented letter is “é”. In most cases “è” is completely redundant as it follows the rule that if the next vowel is a silent “e” then the current “e” takes the \ε\ sound. “Ê” makes the same sound but is there for historical reasons. We can determine if we need an open “e” sound by applying like 2 rules (the aforementioned one and e followed by two consonants is always open) and by memorising some of the multigraphs which are part of the phonetics as it is.
Removing “é” makes it harder to determine pronunciation and makes it easier to confuse tenses, eg “il a mange”, if you’re reading you might “a” and misunderstand the tense (he ate vs he eats). There aren’t any consistent rules for the use of “é” apart from the start of a word.
Personally speaking, I rely on “é” a lot more than I do on “è” and I’ve been tripped up by a missing ’ on “e” many times unlike the other one.
there are definitely words in French, where the accent makes a difference in pronunciation. there are also some cases where there are meaning differences, even when the words are pronounced the same e.g. du vs. dû.
Now it's usually not a problem, as ambiguity in general is rarely a problem in language due to context.
It requires me a mental effort without the accent, though, and I will register it as a typo. You might as well write "il a aimer". The later sounds the same as with the accent, but it's obviously very wrong to put an infinitive there.
I guess I proved your point to some extent: I care less about accent errors than other mistakes, and just consider it a typo. But reading a completely unaccented text is hard for me, and I text, e-mail, and communicate online a lot.
In my experience, people are not foregoing them on purpose, except on capital letters, which is an heritage of AZERTY keyboards + windows (hopefully AFNOR keyboards catches on). Capital accented letters is the example to cite if you want an example of computer technology changing our habits: my friend Etienne (Étienne?) insists there is no accent on hist first name, but it makes no sense to me.
But the point wasn't that you can't recover the meaning from context. Languages are full of homonyms and homographs, and even typos and outright errors usually don't hinder understanding.
The point was simply that accents in French can change pronunciation, or at least change the meaning even if the pronunciation remains the same.
I think the question was whether dropping the accents make reading a text difficult. Of course that may change words so requires a bit more effort but in general it's not that big a deal.
vers, verre, vert.
mer, mère, maire.
In writing you can usually do away with all the accents (many of them are grammatical or the strictly correct spelling but without changing the pronunciation and with little change of the 'look' of the word) without problems.