I had 'accent neutralization' training as part of my hire for a US company in 2004. Americans could not understand my Australian accent. It still affected my accent to this day.
I’m Australian, I’ve had many yanks ask me to my face what language I speak, be shocked we use different money, shocked summer is winter in the southern hemisphere, shocked we drive on the other side of the road, shocked we have atms, etc etc.
It's a sign of people with an extremely small bubble; it's not hard to understand other accents. It requires only a little consideration and acclimatisation.
It's not inherently racist, just very lazy, but it can quickly lead to racism.
You say it requires a little acclimatisation, but the caller may well just not know anyone with that specific accent/have never had the chance to acclimatise to it other than this phone call, there's an awful lot of accents in the world.
Additionally I find even though I can understand an Indian accent for example quite well in person, I really struggle with it over the phone due to the compression causing quite poor sound quality and lack of facial expressions to be able to read (which I would be using in person to help me understand a strong unfamiliar accent), whereas when accent is more familiar to me, the poor audio quality and lack of body language isn't nearly as much of an issue, presumably as I just have way way more exposure to the accent so can fill in gaps better.
You don't need to accustom yourself to every individual accent; you need to practice hearing people say things in different ways. Once you are comfortable with some voices that are different to yours, it's much easier to understand other differences as well.
I'm sympathetic to audio quality issues. No one would object if they developed tech to improve call quality, but they didn't.
I think you’re not taking into account that there are people from hundreds of countries out there whose native language is not English, that are not exposed to different English accents at all other than watching movies etc, and suddenly having to deal with weird accents.
> It's a sign of people with an extremely small bubble; it's not hard to understand other accents.
This seems to be written from the perspective of a native English speaker only, rather than taking the world population into account, which is in itself racist.
English has a wide variety of accents, expose yourself enough and its probably healthy for your brain. I used to not be able to understand different American accents and I'm from the Midwest. Context and patience is king.
You realize that there are more people in the world that are non-native English speakers? Do you think it’s realistic for them to learn all different accents when they’re barely exposed to English in the first place? Don’t you think it’s useful to have some standardized way to pronounce things?
I couldn’t care less whether it’s American English, British English, or whatever.
But to expect everyone in the world to be comfortable with all possible English accents in the world is madness.
Can’t help poor education.