[nfb-talk] paper money -- did anyone hear about this?

[T. Joseph Carter]

Things to consider on this issue:

1. The US Government has committed itself to redesigning our currency
   (save the $1 bill, which would interfere with too many vending machines
   and the like) every twenty years or so.  Doing so supposedly helps keep
   the counterfeiters on their toes.

2. Most of the cost of making the currency accessible would be spent as
   the currency is redesigned anyway.  Doing it at that time makes the
   extra money spent to make the redesigned bills more accessible small
   enough to not be worth arguing about.

3. Any tactile identification features added to the currency would not be
   made universal for years bordering on decades, even if the entire US
   money system were redesigned tomorrow at a cost of billions.  You have
   to get the old bills out of circulation somehow, after all.

4. The problem with the note teller is its price.  Nobody complains that
   clocks in public buildings are inaccessible to the blind because we can
   buy watches for under $20, just like any sighted person, which give us
   access to the time (complete with the addition of an annoying rooster
   sound which is amusing exactly once..)

5. A redesign that would cost nothing extra (over the cost of a redesign
   in the first place) would be to encode the denomination and serial
   number of the bill in some digital means printed right on the bill.
   This still has the decades-to-implement problem, however when the
   transition were complete you could easily replace a $270 device with a
   much smaller one at one tenth the price.


All of that said, this isn't really about making money accessible.  It's
already accessible--how do you think I paid my Internet bill so I could
post this message?  This isn't a battle that needed to be fought.  So the
ACB has their priorities a bit screwed up--since when did that become news
to anyone on this list?

Probably the next round of redesigns will incorporate features to allow us
to identify a random bill handed to us.  It's nice to know that if my
grandchildren are blind, they will not be short changed by someone handing
them a one and telling them it's a five.

Not that I was ever terribly worried about that anyway.  I'm 28 and that's
happened to me exactly one time.  And I was fortunate even then because
the person behind me saw what happened and told me what she saw.  We had a
conversation about how there was always one bad apple on a tree and how
this had never happened before as we went to find the manager.  I was
given proper change and, given that the guy had pocketed the difference,
he was fired on the spot.

Like I said, that it probably won't be able to happen to my grandchildren
if they are blind is a great thing.  And they should take advantage of the
opportunity to prevent it, by all means available.  As should we--if we
get some form of tactile identification system in our money, we'd be fools
not to use it to identify the bills.  It can be done, and it probably
should be done, but we in the NFB have bigger fish to fry, as they say.

Who wants some chips with that?  *grin*


On Tue, Nov 28, 2006 at 06:41:34PM -0500, Laura Eaves wrote:
> The thing is, there is technology --and has been for years -- for
> recognizing paper money.  I have a note teller. Given it is a little pricy,
> that probably excludes some persons, but shouldn't be a problem as a
> business expense if a person works with money on the job.  All we need is
> another misconception about blindness that would make employers hesitant to
> hire someone with a visual impairment.  It's kind of like saying color is
> unfair to blind people.  Well, it is true things are color coded so persons
> without color vision are at a disadvantage, but if we start nixing
> everything in the environment as being exclusionary we will alienate the
> world.
> What do you think?
> Comments welcome.
> --le