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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).
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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.
Canadian paper bills have braille on them.
Or do until the bumps get worn down.
Just using raised ink for the number-value of the currency would help, or even making that into braille.
In Canada, we have a holographic strip in our bills as well. That strip could be shaped distinctively for each bill.
It's smooth where the strip is, so someone could follow the strip with their finger, and by either printing on top of it or increasing the frequency of waves in the strip respective to the bills value would work. That's right, the holographic strip is kind of wavy.
Putting a hole in the US dollar would properly reflect the declining dollar value against other currencies.
We Americans have replaced all our money with plastic too.
It is NOT to stop counterfeiting....
:-)
They made Australian notes plastic to be waterproof. So you can swim up to the bar in the middle of the pool and still pay for a beer
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.
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