I went across northern Europe pre-euro and only had one problem: one of the Swedish notes was tall enough that about five millimetres stuck out of my low-slung Canadian wallet and became all tattered. It was the 50-kroner note with Jenny Lind and music.
Current Canadian notes have differing patterns of bumps in one corner: one set for a five, two for a ten, two widely-spaced for a twenty, etc. I’m not sure how well these work for blind people; they seem to get worn down or flattened after a while.
On the back are sets of printed bars that also vary by denomination; I think the Canadian National Institute for the Blind sells readers that will look at these and identify the note.
[list]
[li] not if the new bills are smaller instead of larger[/li][li] are you sure? ATM feed mechanisms don’t appear to be bill-specific (e.g. these), unless multiple sizes cause a problem.[/li][li] The proposed changes don’t involve changing the one dollar bill, so the vast many vending machines wouldn’t need to change. Didn’t machines for the other bills need to change anyway for the redesigns already happening?[/li][li] ??? My wallet holds different sized currencies just fine, especially if the new bills are smaller or the same size.[/li]
One idea is to put holes in some of the bills - that may not affect ATMs, vending machines, etc. at all, assuming the mag stripe, etc. aren’t disturbed.
In South Korea, we’re currently dealing with the issue of two separate sizes for the 5000 Won bill. The new bill is smaller than the old one. While it is prettier, none of the machines that take bills will take the new 5000 won bill. Next year’s going to be fun, what with the new 10000 won bill being released.
The changeover period is a simple process, as far as the government is concerned. They just don’t print the old size now. If the machine manufacturers don’t wish to make new machines, tough.
How about using currency made of the same stuff as Australia and Brail? It feels like plastic, and lookshard as hell to counterfeit. Plus, you could just use a hot pin to create braille for the blind to tell what denomination.
I’m for it if there’s a problem. But haven’t the blind been working with our money effectively for a coupla hundred years? Don’t get me wrong…if we can do it, we should (and should have) but is this really a panic button issue?
Nope: how they’ve coped with paper money, by and large, has been to have sighted people they trust sort it for them. Exceptions mostly are the barely-sighted legally blind, who can tell if it’s a 10, 20, or 50 by holding the denomination area of the bill directly in frontof their better eye.
And in any case, we’ve only had legal-tender Government paper money for something like 150 years --the Civil War “greenbacks” – although “bank notes” did precede this but were AFAIK not legal tender. (Heckuva great way for banks to advertise, though --having their notes accepted as the common medium of exchange really instills confidence in prospective depositors. I can just see the ads now: “First Federal – the money you can TRUST!” … “Your First Federal banknotes: Don’t leave home without them!” … “First Federal: we back our banknotes with gold!”) In general, up until 1933, blind people needing to handle transactions seem to have normally used coins (including the gold coinage if paying that much) – dealing with paper only when necessary.
I don’t know the provisions of the Rehabilitation Act, but the ADA requires that “reasonable effort” to accommodate the handicapped be expended. If you’re a small museum in Manhattan, for example, and buying and demolishing the building next door to have the land to install a wheelchair ramp would cost 5X your annual budget, you’re permitted to propose a reasonable affordable alternative.
One thing that occurs to me is that this might be folded into the whole dollar-coin issue: If it’s going to require extensive, expensive ways to replace the $1 bill with something that isn’t identical in color and texture to the $20, it may be time to “get a little loonie” in the money department and follow Canada’s lead about coinage.
When I was working at a job to accomodate blind employment, most of the blind folks I worked with pretty much echoed the NFB guy’s comments: they already had methods to work with US currency; it was other issues that they thought needed to be fixed.
Mostly, they complained about ATMs – which generally have brailled keypads, but no voice prompts to tell what the heck you’re being asked to enter. Even so, most of them still used ATMs, and simply memorized the prompts (although I notice that Bank of America, at least, no longer standardizes all its ATMs). They knew that the ATM was spitting out $10s and $20s, and so folded them accordingly.
Some of the other things they complained about were stuff like crosswalk signals – how many audible crossing signals are around?
So, yes this is something that should be fixed, but I don’t think it’s really the highest on the priority list for blind accomodation.
One could argue that stupid/metally challenged people are harmed as well-they give the cashier a $20.00 bill, and the cashier cheats them 9claims it was a $10.00 bill). Is there any move by the esteemed justice to right this wrong?
The courts are getting more and more bizarre by the day…say, what does PETA have to say about this?
I’m just curious how many countries already had paper money with differing sized denominations for many years, long before millions of standardized vending machines and cash register drawers dotted the entry countryside. Because those countries would have developed their machines to meet their money long before those machines reached a “saturation” point. It’s a lot easier to make a switch like this prior to around 1950 or so in the United States, and more recently for other countries which have gotten widespread money-machine (ATMs, change machines, vending machines, modernized cash registers and etc.) usage in more recent years.
I get all that, and like I say…if it’s an issue and it’s going to improve their lives, that’s great and it’s about time. But what’s to stop the shop owner from saying, "That’ll be $10.59 when it was really only $6.27? I don’t see it actually solving the problem. I don’t know any blind people at the moment, but I’ll bet debit cards are absolutely rockin’ their worlds. Provided everything is priced correctly, of course. My sighted dad is forever catching the grocery store in mistakes. And those little pricing tags aren’t in Braille, either. It seems like this will be a costly effort to only *sort of * fix the problem.
How much difference in size does there need to be for a blind person to be able tell which bill is which? Seems like the size difference would have to be pretty substantial. I’m not saying this is either pro or con wrt the issue at hand, but I was just curious. Assuming this would only affect 1, 5, 10 ,20 ,50 and 100 dollar bills, that’s still 6 different bills that would all have to be substantially different in size.
Not so. In my lifetime the UK’s paper currency size has changed across the board three times. The Irish currency size changed twice since I was living there - the last change being to the euro. Every single eurozone country has also had to do this once during the current decade.
Well you can always contact a manager and have them pull the drawer and count it out. If the drawer is $10 over, then you get your money. This happened to me many times when I worked in retail and people would insist that they gave me large demonination bills ($50s and $100s) and that I shorted them on the change. I never did, but there’s always a way to be sure.
I’m aware countries have done it, I just wasn’t aware of how many, I wasn’t aware that the UK had, I was aware that countries adopting the euro had.
How did Europe deal with all the vending machine and cash register standards being changed?
I think it’s definitely harder to change currency when tons of standardized machines are based on currency being a set size; just because many countries have done it successfully does not reverse the fact that it is a significant overhaul.
Also, was it not the case that in many European countries and in the UK different sized denominations were already the norm? Or not? I don’t really remember too much about paper currency in any of the European countries I’ve visited prior to the adoption of the euro.
It also seems likely that since many countries in Europe had for various reasons substantially changed their currency several times this century that manufacturers of change machines, cash registers, and vending machines were already equipped to deal with varying standards and may have built their machines to be easily modified, while this isn’t the case as much in a country where we haven’t had a change in the size of our money in ages.
Maybe they could install those little musical chips from greeting cards, to play something appropriate to the personage depicted: “Yankee Doodle”, “The Battle Hymn Of The Republic”, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”, etc.
So far nobody has mentioned texture, which strikes me as the easiest and least disruptive change. Some system like:
Ones are unchanged.
Fives have a single narrow stripe of different texture at each vertical end.
Tens have a pair of narrow stripes at each vertical end.
Twenties have a single narrow strip along each horizontal edge.
Fifites have a pair of narrow stripes at each vertical end.
Hundreds had single stripes along both sets of ends.
Easy to tell apart, and it needn’t affect the size or shape at all, maybe the printing might look a bit different on stripe and off, but that’s trivial.
