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US Paper Money Discriminates Against the Blind
CWRUisTakingMyMoney writes in to let us know about a US Appeals Court ruling declaring that paper money discriminates against blind people who must rely on others to tell them what denomination of money they have. "A US federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that the country's one-sized paper money discriminates against the blind and told the government to change the currency's size and texture. The court upheld a previous ruling in November 2006... [that] had ordered the Treasury Department to find a way to accommodate the more than three million visually-impaired Americans who have trouble distinguishing the different US denominations which are all the same size and color... 'A large majority of other currency systems have accommodated the visually impaired, and the [Treasury] secretary does not explain why US currency should be any different,' the court said in its ruling."
.. I can not see any comment.
All the notes are the same size and color - I stand at the head of the queueline at the checkoutregister, and take notes out of my wallet, one at a time, saying "Nope, that's a single; nope, that's a single; I'm sure there's a 20 in here somewhere."
Then there are the values. in the UK, coins range from 1p (~2c) to £2 (~$4). If you want to pay for something in a vending machine, there's a coin. Here, you've got to feed in a note, clean it, try again, give up with that note, try another note, etc, etc.
If it doesn't take notes, you've got to use quarters, worth about 13p. To do our weekly washing requires a small mountain of coins, which need to be jealously hoarded.
Then there's the size of the coins - why doesn't size correlate with value? Shouldn't a dime be bigger than a nickel?
And finally, there's the fact that none of the coins say how much they are worth on them. A dime? What's that worth than? I don't know, and I can't find out.
Before new coins are introduced in the UK they do research to determine the best size for them, to help blind people (and others) distinguish between them. There's a PDF here, which very briefly describes some of it. (Sorry, it's a PDF, and that's the Google link).
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
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someone mod this comment informative.
They have pocket money reading machines that speak the value, like feeding a bill into a vending machine, the little gizmo knows that it is...
http://www.tiresias.org/equipment/eb17.htm
at the top of this link are a couple of the devices. I like how the euro one is simply a ruler.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
If we make bills different sizes, the $20 bill had better still be ATM-sized (or else buy stock in an ATM company). Oh yes -- in any case, buy stock in a cash register company. Unless we keep the bills the same size and give them all different textures, edge designs, or what-not. Maybe bills should be embossed in Braille? They wouldn't stack as compactly, but it might beat other forms of retooling.
I seem to remember a story about this a while ago. I had an idea to fix it that I will repeat here.
Punching a different size hole in the bill according to it's denomination. The larger the hole, the smaller the bill, so you couldn't 'upgrade' them with scissors. Or elliptical holes parallel/perpendicular/diagonal to the length of the bill. The main advantage I see is that there would not need to be much expansive change to the existing printing setup.
The only problems I see is that it may negatively affect their wear resistance and people could make the wrong size hole in existing currency. Although, that would probably not be a serious problem as it would only work on the limited number of blind people.
We replaced all of our paper money with (slightly) textured plastic notes some time back. We use different colours for each note, and more sophisticated security features to avoid counterfeiting.
:D
I supose its to be expected that America would lag the rest of the world in its currency, considering you still use imperial measurements
See pic of Australian notes: Australian Money
Ray Charles solution of being paid in one dollar bills is a good solution although it does make house buying a long and laborious process...
Well, it'd certainly be an interesting currency. It would probably vie with early post-barter systems based on large bags of elephant dung for the title of "most inconvenient currency ever".
I don't know who makes ATMs in America ; I know that the ones on the streets of Britain, Norway, France, Russia, Germany, Tanzania, and (if I recall correctly) Azerbaijan are made by the "usual suspects" such as Motorola, NCR and other multi-national currency-handling manufacturers. There may be others - I've not made any effort to be systematic in noting manufacturers logos even if they're visible.
Given that, are you seriously proposing that manufacturers actually produce one range of products specifically tailored for one size of notes in one country, and a different set of products with an overlapping specification for use in the rest of the world?
The big difficulty in ATMs isn't the area of the notes, or their dimensions ; it's counting the edges of the notes and making sure that the right number are dispensed. My bet would be that *that* area is where the patents are applied. The rest of the machine is just sheet-handling machinery - probably somewhat better quality than you get in a £100 laser printer, but not fundamentally different. So that means one product line, world wide, with the only localised differences being in logos and software.
Look closely at the next ATM that you can (without being arrested for having a terrorist-like excessive interest in valuable machinery) - compare the width of the cash-dispensing slot's weather-proofing with the width of the widest note in your currency : unless you live in a country with the widest currency in the world, you'll most likely find that the slot will accommodate wider notes than you use.
You'll probably find that the dimensions to which ATMs are built are now acting as constraints on the dimensions of note design.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
When I first heard about this problem in 2006, I thought long and hard about the problem, and it seems to me that one of the best solutions, which would not have most of the problems that current suggestions have, and at the same time would help the blind, and would make counterfeiting more difficult, would be to have the bills have different textures, by possibly using multiple materials to produce them. I emailed this suggestion to Larry Felix, and while he was kind enough to respond back, and say they would think about it, apparently it wasn't implemented. I'm just surprised that my suggestion hasn't shown up in any of the news coverage. What do you Slashdotters think? Anything we can do as a group to get this solution implemented?
The government *wants* you to save those $1 and never spend them. They don't care about adoption rates or other such nonsense. What it does do is allow them to print lots of money (more than is being taken out of circulation) and make a profit. Hoarding money dampens inflation, which is pretty bad anyway.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Huh?
Wouldn't it be easier to have blind people use a device that can TELL them which bill it is?
Plus, that device can genuinely authenticate it being valid currency using some of the high-tech methods that change machines use.
Surely that has to be better than changing the size or texture.
If we *merely* changed the size and texture, people could trick blind people all the time with their FALSE sense of confidence that they have a $100 bill because it's fuzzy and rounder, but they really just got handed some felt.
What's great about anonymous cowards like you is that it only takes one mod point to send your default-of-zero crap to minus-1 hell.
And what's great is that it's so obvious I only need to say it once.
What I don't get is why the government bothered to fight the suit in the first place. It's been going on for 6 years, which means it probably came up right around the time they were designing their "new" bills in the first place. They added color, watermarks and everything, why couldn't they have made some improvements so the blind could identify their own bills? It's a good, solid improvement, and if the lawyers weren't allowed to follow their first instincts, they could have fixed the bills without much fuss.
And don't say that they can use debit cards, that's a cop-out. Debit cards are not accepted everywhere, and are especially useless in the more personal interactions that people who are dependent on help are likely to encounter. Say you're blind...you'll probably have someone do your grocery shopping for you. Finding the price of apples on a chalk sign would be impossible, not to mention checking nutritional labels, or inspecting the produce. So you want to give them some money to do it? Better hope you filed it correctly into your wallet the last time. Count the change you got back? Good luck, you'd better hope your assistant is trustworthy, because it is absolutely impossible to differentiate one denomination from another without seeing it. Why don't you just give them your card and tell them your PIN?