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Judge Says U.S. Money Violates Rights of the Blind
An anonymous reader writes, "The United States is one of the few countries in the world whose currency isn't distinguishable by blind people. Most other nations use raised text, different-sized bills, or other methods to assist blind people in spending their money. If a recent decision by a federal court in D.C. survives appeal, however, that will soon change. Under Sec. 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, federal programs cannot deny 'meaningful access' to people with disabilities. Because blind people are unable to distinguish U.S. currency without assistance, the court held that they are denied meaningful access to their own money. U.S. District Judge James Robertson ordered the Treasury Department to come up with ways for the blind to tell bills apart. He said he wouldn't tell officials how to fix the problem, but he ordered them to begin working on it." How Appealing notes that Judge Robertson opened the door to a speedy appeal of his ruling.
US currency is the easiest to forge in the world. You take a $1 bill, wash it clean and reprint it with a $100 bill. This will really increase the costs to forgers, and they should sue the treasury for loss of earnings.
The bills in the US are difficult to distinguish under conditions other than blindness, it's about time we caught up with the rest of the world. We make coins different shapes, sizes and textures, why not bills.
I can see quite well with glasses, and this very thing has annoyed me plenty of times. Why the hell are all our bills the same size, shape, and color? :)
Make them more distinct, and you'll speed up all cash transactions.
If nothing else the fast food industry will thank you
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Why is the Treasury Department appealing this ruling? They should embrace it and start solving the problem.
Who exactly is harmed with this decision? I don't even see why it went to court in the first place.
Doesn't it make sense to have easily distinguishable notes anyway, blind or not? Finding the correct note in your wallet is much slower with dollars than Euros or pounds.
The cost to retool the machinery is significant. I don't know where they'd be able to scrape together that sort of cash.
I always did wonder how, in the U.S., blind people dealt with money. I ended up meeting a friend of my father's who was blind, so I asked him. He told me that he has someone (someone who can see, obviously) fold his money a certain way -- singles get folded in half, 5's got folded into an L-shape, 10's got folded another way and so on so that he always knew what denomination of money he was taking out of his wallet.
Ramps built into buildings for wheelchairs make it easier to get heavy gear in and out. Braile on ATM keyboards and lift buttons make it easier to distinguish between keys. Audio-tactile devices on pedestrian crossings provide a better UI for people regardless of whether they can see or not.
Trust me. US currency will be better for everybody if it accomodates blind people.
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Scratch and sniff.
Make each bill smell like something else. Make a five smell like coffee, since thats what a coffee at starbucks costs. Ten smells like pizza. Twenty smells like chinese food, and a hundred smells like fine leather.
The one doesn't smell like a damn thing, since you can't do much with it anyway.
They're called debit card readers.
Seriously, I worked with some blind people in college and they would just use a credit/debit card for everything.
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and turn it into a coin. Not this half-assed production of a few coins and predominantly bills. Get it over with and make it purely coins. It'll make vending machines more convenient. Coins are easily distinguishable.
On mony, just have an imprinted (raised) mark whereever the denomination number is printed. It doesn't have to be elaborate - just dots like braile.
I'm surprised this didn't come sooner with the Americans with disabilities act, or some such.
On a trip to the states a while back, in a dimly lit strip club, I accidentally gave several $20 bills to a stripper instead of $1s, got a bit more than I bargained for. Wouldn't say it was a waste exactly, but you can't claim that shit back on expenses!
Oh no... it's the future.
This is just a really poor decision that should be blocked by the next court up the chain. Reading the decision the judge goes into how bad it is that the bill are all the same and how it places a hardship, which it does. However devices are available which allow around which allow the money to meet the law. The judge should of told the people sueing that they should go take it up with thier congressmen; instead of doing this stupid soapbox speech.
Some other decision by him:
Private unions cannot expell members who spread "falsehood and misrepresentation" because that breaks the members freedom of speech.
Has through out a few cases for companies giving expensive gifts to government officials.
In various court cases has just ignored major case points on various parties and ruled based on older laws that had been superceded.
Ain't going to happen. Europe does it (as well as integrating a whole bunch of additional anti-counterfeit measures), so it must be un-American. Never mind the blind, God (with a capital G) must hate them or they wouldn't be blind, right ? Also, it could help the terrorists. Dollar notes are just fine the way they are.
blind people are completely incapable of judging size anyway as it has no meaning to them; theirs is a world without size, colour, distance or space.
I can agree with you on colour, but without size, distance or space? I don't think so; they'd have trouble doing anything at all if they couldn't perceive those. Check out this guy.
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but the £5 note is their only note that will comfortably fit in my standard-sized wallet.
Wallets are designed to hold money. Not the other way round. Mine holds a wad of £50 notes quite easily.
I wish I could verify that with my wallet.... :(
At the beginning of 2002 vast swathes of Western Europe managed to change not just the size and shape of their notes but introduced a completely new currency at the same time. In Germany (and possibly other places) they even managed to fix it so that ATMs gave out Deutschmark right up until midnight on Dec. 31, 2001 and as soon as 2002 rolled over, pumped out shiny new Euro notes.
Other countries such as the UK regularly replace their currency designs, usually every 10 - 15 years or so.
If the US did the same, it would benefit maybe not just blind people but keep e.g. the North Korean counterfeiters on their toes.
Blind people don't really need free wheelchairs...
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
and for more improvement, we could print the value of the card on the outside of the card. and have a bunch of cards in varying amounts of money so if you lose one you don't lose all your money. we could make them green to distinguish them from other cards. maybe put some pictures of dead presidents on them.
1. Use hole-punching so blind can read bills.
2. Punch the $100 hole pattern in current $1 bills.
3. Profit!
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That's funny - the EU countries had no problem changing their vending machines around once the Euro came. They didn't even change the machines, the money accepting mechanism is modular (woah!).
Keeping the $1 is costing money for taxpayers. If it becomes standard, vending machines will start accepting it fast. The government has the power in this case of the chicken or the egg.
This is modded 'funny', but instead I would mod it 'horrifying'. This is EXACTLY how the system would be exploited. The only use for this system is to make it so blind people don't need to ask for help to verify the money is legit. This con would then make it so they still need to ask for help. How did anything improve?
Okay, I suppose if they want to count the money in their wallet, and they KNOW it's all legit, this would help. But they each probably already have a system for that, anyhow. Different folds, dog-ears, etc. At the expense of the whole of the United States, we can help them NOT ONE BIT.
Sounds great, let's do it.
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But the solution to the aforementioned problem is to make the highest currency bill have the least holes. Therefore, you could turn a $100 bill into a $1 by punching holes, but not vice-versa. There are other problems with the idea, of course.
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To make any changes to currency would not only require completely recirculating the billions of papers out there, but it would probably require drastic changes to the printing process. Different shapes, sizes, or including braille print sound like expensive alterations.
I doubt the courts would require all currency to be recalled, especially since much currency has only an 18-month lifespan. And since we're redesigning the larger bills (5 through 100) every 7 years or so, we've already committed to spending a certain amount of money on redesign. Incorporating some raised devices (as on Canada's currency) would be a trivial addition to the next round of redesigns.
Changing the size of currency would obviously cost a lot more, but the Treasury is constantly looking at new printing technology, and so that could also be spread out as they replace equipment. Nobody said this had to happen overnight. And, oh, we've done this before -- in the 1920's we changed from a large format currency to the current small-sized notes. And before anyone brings up vending machine and ATM manufacturers' complaints, differing note sizes hasn't hurt anyone in Europe (where ATMs regularly dispense bills in four or more denominations, each a different size).
And this might finally be what lets Congress stand up to lobbyists and kill the dollar bill. Not only are we out of step with the rest of the world on blind access to currency, we're just about the only major country stubborn enough to still use currency for our primary currency measure -- everyone else, Pounds, Euro, Canadian Dollar, Australian Dollar, have coins for 1 and 2 unit, and sometimes even 5 unit, denominations. I read recently that eliminating the dollar bill would save half a billion (BILLION) dollars a year, and that was a 1995 study, so it's probably even higher. But lobbyists (primarily for the unions that produce the paper) have consistently stopped cold any attempt to switch to coins only.
Anyway, I think the Judge is right and, though this wouldn't be free, it wouldn't be an undue burden.
And now we hit upon the Great Slashdot Self-Absorption.
Because you don't use cash any longer, no one does.
This premise can be expanded by stating that if anyone still does do the thing you don't do (or, conversely, doesn't do the thing you do) they are morons.
To ward off the sample size critics you could state that no one you know uses cash either.
Hm, I have yet to see a free money or debit card reader anywhere. For bills, money identifiers are quite expensive and a bit bulky. As far as debit card readers, those are not free either. Sometimes state agencies for the blind may be willing to pay for one, on an individual basis, but that certainly does not apply to the majority of blind people.
Also, note that you can't just use debit cards for everything. There are quite a few things in life that you do need cash for, and blind people should not be excluded from being able to use regular money.
Finally, making bills accessible isn't really rocket science. Looking around at other countries around the world, the US is really far behind in this. Unfortunately for the blind, the US treasury has a very large loophole (although it could make for an interesting legal battle): all US currency ever printed remains legal tender, so even if new bills are made accessible, there will remain a large amount of inaccessible bills in circulation for a *long* time. Other countries have been able to replace bills. On the other hand, that also means that it is even more important for the US to act on this immediately, because the problem only gets bigger (and they already missed the boat on the last bill redesign (using colour) that went through recently).
Here is a page describing the accessibility features of all of the world's currencies as of 1995. Note that the US is the only country on the list that didn't have a single one of the 4 features they look at, and Brazil was very rare in using just bill color (which is obviously useless to people who are completely blind) to distinguish bills. China's currency includes a tactile recognition symbol, and India's uses a different size bill for some denominations.
Besides, a more fair comparison would be not to similar-sized countries, but to other industrialized democracies. But, for the record, almost every country in Africa has (or had, in 1995) more accessible currency than the US.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
There are still a whole host of low value transactions where cash is the most appropriate way to pay. Perhaps you have changed your lifestyle to fit your no cash utopia, but to suggest that others do likewise because they had the misfortune to be born blind or to have lost their eyesight is plain wrong.
The US is the onlycountry on earth with notes that are indistinguishable from one another for the blind. Here's a hint, it's not because the rest of the world is waiting to catch up to the United States...
Want to see something sad? Next time gas prices are near $3/gallon, go inside a convenience store. Don't pick a nice one.
When I visit just such a convenience store once a week to buy gas, and have to pay cash about every other time because the damn pump card reader is out-of-order, I see just such people walking in and cashing government checks - and then buying 2 cartons of cigarettes and $100 of lottery tickets. My sympathy meter is pretty much broken.
I never said that I never use cash; I said (actually, OP said) that it was possible to use no (or very little) cash. All the examples you gave are quite easy to pay for with a debit card. (The newspaper is the most problematic one, although bookstores and convenience stores sell them and take debit cards. And I should note that you aren't buying newspapers from street corners if you're blind.)
So here's the deal. On one hand, we can spend huge amounts of money to change our money system. This means changing money readers in vending machines, retraining sales clerks, changing our printing systems, dealing with fraud during the changeover, etc., etc. It's simply a huge project. On the other hand, we could ask the blind, who have been dealing with this without the benefit of ubiquitous debit cards ever since paper money has been around, to keep dealing with it in an environment more convenient for them than ever before. Maybe I'm hardhearted, but this seems like a really simple choice. We shouldn't have to make huge changes to accommodate every handicap people have.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
What I want to know is, where is this gas station, where blind people are lining up to pay $5 in cash to get gas for their car? I don't want to be ANYWHERE near where blind people are driving!!!!
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