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 must be blind ...

[McGiraf]

.. I can not see any comment.

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[McGiraf]

More like 23 hours after it was posted , no one saw the story it seems. Oh, the irony!

Who designed American money anyway?

[jeremymiles]

I moved to the US 18 months ago, from the UK, and I'm amazed by the money, and how user unfriendly it is.

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). [google.com]

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[Profane MuthaFucka]

The dime is not an abberation, it's a logical denomination of our currency. It's a decimal currency, so logically you have denominations that are powers of 10. Mill, Cent, Dime, and Dollar. Every other denomination is expressed in terms of those, which are each 10 times bigger than the previous.

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[Profane MuthaFucka]

The label is pefectly clear. All the denominations have precise meanings. The real problem is that language courses in foreign countries are not teaching their students what a dime is.

Fortunately, with money, there is a great inCENTive to learn what a dime is worth...

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[Anonymous Coward]

While I do agree with you on some points, don't start a fight if you can't finish it. Here's my points:

*The US has released many iterations of the Dollar coins but no one uses them; people hated the Susan B. Anthony because of the similarity to the Quarter, The Sacajawea Dollar was applauded but mainly collected and the new Presidential Dollar coins have similar collector-based problems. If Americans truly wanted to use Dollar coins, there would be more in circulation instead of sitting in shoe boxes gath

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[jrumney]

If you release a coin in small quantities, then of course they are going to become collectable and sit in collectors' drawers. That happens with £5 coins too, despite 30 million of them going into circulation since 1990. If they're really serious about introducing a dollar coin, they'd do a proper production run, and judging by the economics cited by other countries' mints, they'd save a lot in printing costs by making the move completely.

Having seen a documentary a few years back about the US upda

Treasury Shenanigans

[dj245]

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.

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[arwel]

British coinage has way more problems than American coinage. You have a 2p bigger than a 20p, a 5p smaller than a 1p and a 10p larger (thicker, I'll grant) a Pound piece. That two Pound piece while I do like it could cause blunt force trauma if you threw it at somebody. With that many coins in my back pocket I'd develop a back problem.

That's not a problem, we use colour, weight, and shape to help distinguish coins - 1p and 2p are round, copper coloured coins, 5p and 10p are round silver coloured coins, 20p and 50p are seven-sided silver coloured coins, £1 is a thick, round golden coin, £2 is a large, thin, bi-metallic coin. It's easy to distinguish them by touch, even when they're in your pocket and you've got about £9 in loose change in there.

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[BungaDunga]

We've got some new bills that are slightly colored: pinkish 20s and purplish 5s, apparently to fight counterfeiting.

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[ncc74656]

I moved to the US 18 months ago, from the UK, and I'm amazed by the money, and how user unfriendly it is.

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."

What's so hard about looking at the numbers on the bills? They're in each corner on both sides. If you keep them sorted, it takes no time at all to pul

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[shentino]

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.

hah. one article hidden from all

[nawcom]

hilarious. hidden from view, almost a day after posted and only 4 comments.

tits boobies gnaa!!

someone mod this comment informative.

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[CWRUisTakingMyMoney]

Actually, I posted this Tuesday night; I don't know why this article is stuffed away over here. Maybe it was timestamped 24 hours too early for some reason?

The story is true, but

[EkriirkE]

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 [tiresias.org]
at the top of this link are a couple of the devices. I like how the euro one is simply a ruler.

Kennita

[Kennita]

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.

ATM dimensions

[RockDoctor]

If we make bills different sizes, the $20 bill had better still be ATM-sized (or else buy stock in an ATM company)

By ATM-sized, I take it that you mean "about 0.5m wide, 1m deep and 1.5m high"? At least that's the size of common free-standing ATMs over here, and I'd assume that the ones built into walls are about the same size behind the brickwork.

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

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[RockDoctor]

Go slit your fucking wrists fucktard.

Ah, someone trying to drag down the devel of discourse on slashdot. What a BIG surprise.

My solution

[AnotherBrian]

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

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[dave87656]

Putting a hole in the US dollar would properly reflect the declining dollar value against other currencies.

Compared to Australian Money...

[mongie]

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.

I supose its to be expected that America would lag the rest of the world in its currency, considering you still use imperial measurements :D

See pic of Australian notes: Australian Money [mongie.com]

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[supervillainsf]

We Americans have replaced all our money with plastic too.

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[glamb]

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 :-)

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[mongie]

I worded that poorly, what I meant to say was... We use different colours for each note to assist in identification. We also use more sophisticated security features (than a line in the paper).

There is a workaround

[BlackTarw]

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...

A Solution

[tetrakatus]

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 w

A device that tells them which bills?

[llamafirst]

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 han

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[isotactic]

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 f

No Good Reason to Change

[MarkAyen]

'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.

...and I don't really see a compelling argument why the US Treasury should re-tool its entire money-printing infrastructure to accomodate a vanishingly-small percentage of the population, particularly when (as someone else [slashdot.org] pointed out) there are mechanical readers to accomodate those people.