Whether people have paid more attention to the "access of people with disabilities"
To further my understanding of this word, I used the statistical method and analyzed the frequency at which the word is used in the news reports and literary works according to the data from both the Corpus and the Google Ngram website. By doing so, I also tried to examine whether people paid attention to the “access of people with disabilities” over the past decades. I compared the usage of the word with those of its synonyms, “opportunity” and “availability.” So we may get a clear idea of the using trend of the word "access" over decades.
From the charts above, we could see the trends in the three words from 1800 to 2000. The y-axis just shows us of all the unigrams contained in the written work in American English, what percentage of them are the three words(Google Ngram)? Here, we could see that the word “opportunity” is always used frequently at about 0.0085% of the all the words, while the use of the word “access” remained at a relatively low level around 0.002% but began to increase since the 1960s, overtaking “opportunity” in the middle 1980s. The fact that the Civil Rights Movements began in the 1950s and the Disability Rights Movement began in the 1960s possibly gives us a reasonable explanation as to why the use of “access” increased in the 1960s. Furthermore, to confirm this reasoning for the sharp increase in the use of the word is in relation to disability, I searched again on the Corpus website and attached collocates as “disabled” and “handicapped” with the word “access.” It turns out that the use of the word “access” in the news reports and literary works increased sharply since the 1980s, which leads us to the conclusion that society and advocators focused more on disabled people and their rights.
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