Japanese Dialects / Accents
 

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

I don't think you can skip Kansai, Kyusyu, and Okinawa dialects.
I think you had better list all of the 47 prefecture's names. :)

Here are some reliable research for Japanese dialects.

日本語の方言 - Wikipedia

And this picture (from the Wiki site) shows the major dialects on the Map.

I got my original list by combining the English Wikipedia Japanese dialects page with two others (about.com) and the one at Japanese Dialects - Osaka-ben Nagoya-ben Hiroshima-ben Kyoto-ben Fukuoka-ben Hokkaido-ben Sendai-ben I messed up the list somehow. I'm going to give it another try.

You're right I left some out that I should not have. I'm going to give it another try, but maybe not all 47 prefectures.

]I disagree with you.
Each Japanese people think that their dialect is different from those of other areas even within the same prefecture.
In that case, one should mention their cities or towns as well.

Even if I don't talk about such exaggeration,
for example, people in Kyoto and people in Osaka speak very different Japanese, although their dialects are considered as the same category, kansai ben, according to the rough classification.