I just saw a news story that a federal appeals court has ruled that the US discriminates against blind people by producing currency that cannot be distinguished by the visually impaired. The US Treasury could be forced to redesign its paper money to differentiate between the different values. This came out of a lawsuit filed by the American Council for the Blind, whose president said, “I don’t think we should have to rely on [other] people to tell us what our money is.” What do you think about this?

I think it’s an easy knee-jerk reaction to say that they can learn to deal with it, but consider this: The court said that government might as well argue that, since handicapped people can crawl on all fours or ask for help from strangers, there’s no need to make buildings wheelchair accessible. Sounds like a valid point to me.

Foreigners coming to the US often have difficulty with our money, more than we might have going abroad, because it all looks the same. Many countries around the world use different colors for different denominations (not that that would help the blind, of course), and some vary in size as well. That might challenge makers of cash registers, currency counting machines, and ATMs, but they deal with it overseas, so I’m sure they could adapt here as well. And it might make counterfeiting that much harder too.

Another possible solution being mentioned is the use of raised markings on the bills, along the lines of braille, I guess. Which brings to mind that great question, perhaps first posed by George Carlin (or was it Jerry Seinfeld?): Why are there braille markings on the ATM in the drive-thru lane?

On a trip about ten years ago, we discovered that Australian money has small clear plastic windows in it. It looks really cool, although I suppose the Aussies got used to it quickly, and money is money. But it struck me that this would be a very difficult and expensive style to duplicate in your basement. I believe their denominations came in different sizes as well - the smaller the value, the smaller the dimensions.

Is this too logical to ever be adopted by the one country in the world that still refuses to embrace the metric system? It just might be. After all, as a nation, we still stubbornly hold on to pennies, which cost more to mint than they are worth, and we resist all efforts to encourage use of dollar coins, decades after our neighbors to the north went loony. Is there any hope that our leadership will address these various issues? Probably not - they’ll just pass the buck.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Al. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.