An accent is not "the same note played louder." An accent and a tap are two different motions, played at two different stick heights. George Lawrence Stone's Stick Control (pages 29–31) makes this explicit: the accent stroke begins from a high prepared stick and ends at low position; the tap stroke stays low through the whole motion.
If you treat them as the same motion played with different effort, you'll fight your hands forever. If you treat them as two different physical events — one with a prepared height, one without — accent placement becomes a matter of which stick is high right now, not a matter of how hard you swing.
The accent (full stroke). Stick prepared high (10–12 inches off the head), driven down with the wrist, allowed to rebound back to high. Loud, full, ringing. The starting position before the next note is again high.
The tap (down stroke / low stroke). Stick stays at 1–2 inches throughout. Played from the fingers, with very little wrist. Quiet, dry, articulate.
The trick — and Stone's whole point — is that you have to plan stick height. After an accent, you might need the next stroke to be a tap. That requires a down stroke: the accent ends low instead of rebounding up, so the next stroke starts from low (and is therefore quiet). After a tap that needs to lead into an accent, you'd play an up stroke: tap volume but rebound to high, prepared for the accent that follows.
For now, the four stroke types in classical drumming theory are: full (high → high), down (high → low), tap (low → low), up (low → high). This lesson installs the two extremes (full and tap). The Moeller lesson next adds the smooth transitions between them.