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.