Who are these people?
Perhaps they are from the majority of humans who use languages
written with glyphs absent from ASCII (and I don't mean Smalltalk-79.)
Or maybe they have a pressing need to use the International
Phonetic Alphabet entities because the "new economy" synchronous
telephony systems are insufficiently more useful than ordinary
"old economy" synchronous telephony systems, and the only way
some of the necessary engineering staff will ever get interested
in asynchronous telephony is if they get to use the IPA for their
latest compression schemes.
Maybe they want to be able to include UNICODE art, which is much
like ASCII art but more creative.
Whoever they are, and whatever they want, they will probably agree
that also having an English version, in ASCII, in addition to the
non-ASCII version if there is one, is a good thing.
Cheers,
James