[davidannis]

I am developing web based software to teach Japanese. I am quite far along in the project, having created flashcards that work off of a database of 30,000 common Japanese words. I want to add pronunciation from native speakers. Since I'm not planning on charging for the software I can't really see paying professionals so I was planning on trading English lessons for recordings of lists of words and phrases. I imagine I will get a wide variety of voices recording the words. So that users can better understand and choose between voices I was planning on asking each native speaker to characterize their voice. After some research, I have come up with the following list of regional accents:
Hachijō, Hokkaidō, *hyōjungo, 標準語 Ibaraki, Kantō, Nagoya, Tōhoku
*Standard Japanese

I also plan to ask each speaker their sex and age (in a broad range)

My questions are -- 1. Does the list of dialects/accents look reasonable?
2. Are there other things that you would want to know about a speaker that I am not asking?
3. Am I making a mistake by using dialect and accent more or less interchangeably? Am I over-complicating things by trying to characterize voices. Note: I realize that for real beginners this is not an issue but I am trying to concentrate on advanced beginners to intermediate speakers (because that is the level I'm at and I am doing this in large part for my own education).

Thanks,
David