People who speak with an accent know it can lead to discrimination. It can cost them in job interviews, at work and in everyday exchanges. But what they usually have to go on is anecdote: their own experiences and those of people they know.

Interestingly, research demonstrates that listeners can often understand accented speech well. Yet those findings rarely reach accented speakers themselves or the practitioners who make important decisions that affect their lives, such as hiring managers.

That disconnect served as motivation for our recent projects. They aim to help people better recognize, understand and combat accent bias.

Read more: Accentism for profit? What Telus is getting wrong about accents

Turning participants into researchers

One promising way to address the gap between researchers and practitioners is citizen science, which treats members of the public as researchers.

It’s typically used to collect local data on a large scale via activities like photographing wildlife or tracking plastic pollution.

This approach is usually unidirectional, with citizen scientists handing data over to researchers. We wanted knowledge to flow both ways.

That led us to adopt a community-based participatory approach, in which community members are involved at every stage, from study design to publication.

Immigrants studying their own........

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