Yes, I've listened to myself a few times - I'm a schwa-vowel-grunt. Ugh-CEPT ! Obviously part of my Neanderthal past.

I'll back up SuKi here - sometimes they sound exactly the same. I had years of elocution lessons at school where I was drilled, military fashion, to get Accept and Except to sound different. And on a good day, with a lot of effort, and if I'm not in a hurry, YES, I can get them to sound like an A or an E. HOWEVER, MOST OF THE TIME I SAY THEM THE SAME. And the people around me, who are very posh well-educated sorts (!) say them the same too!

I'm going to stick my neck out here and disagree with the other answerers. I think that some of us do pronounce these words in the same way. Yes, obviously 'accept' starts with an 'a' and 'except' starts with an 'e'. That's obvious - you don't need anyone to tell you that. That's how the words are spelt, and that's how many native speakers THINK that they pronounce them. However, when you listen to natural, native-speaker speech, you will hear that this is not necessarily the case. As I'm sure you've learnt, a key factor in English pronunciation is stress. In both of these words, the stressed syllable is the second one - the 'cept' syllable. The first syllable is unstressed. Something that not everyone realises is the fact that unstressed syllables are always pronounced with one of two sound - either /ɪ/ or /ə/ . Regardless of the spelling, these are the only two ways that an unstressed syllable is pronounced. The word 'accept' is pronounced like this: /əkˈsept/ The word 'except' is usually pronounced like this: /ɪkˈsept/ . However, some native speakers also use the schwa sound /ə/ for the first syllable of 'except', making it the same as 'accept'. This may vary from one accent to another, and from one person to another. So the answer to your question is this - yes, sometimes they are.

The vowel sounds at the start of these words are going to depend on accent and region. But I think Jmat's response is the most common. When people are talking quickly, though, they will often be pronounced the same, and actually have the same "i" vowel sound as "him" at the start! Therefore, they can both sound like "ik-sept". So don't be shocked when you hear people say that!

accept = ack sept except = x sept