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March 17, 2009

ThisAbility #20 Cash that Really is Cold and Hard

Posted by Aaron Broverman at 02:57 PM ET

It's amazing the things you learn from TV. One lesson, a few weeks back, came courtesy of John Quinones and his ABC Primetime series What Would You Do?

It's a hidden camera show that tests whether people would intervene in various situations. It was on this show that I learned the United States of America is the only country in the developed world that doesn't have accessibility features for the blind on their money.

Leading to incidents where clerks short change their customer because they know those customers can't tell what denominations they're getting back. It appearently happens on a more frequent basis than you may think.

All American bills are the same size, texture and colour, which makes it extemely difficult to differentiate between a $5 bill and a $20 bill without the aid of machines or sighted people, leaving America's blind population at a severe disadvantage when compared to the visually impaired in other countries.

It may not be noticeable to the naked eye, but every Canadian banknote has raised tactile dots on the opposite top corner from the smaller printed number. The higher the denomination, the more dots there are.
The Euro is the gold standard for accessibility, each demonination increases in physical size as you move up the value scale and each number on the note is a raised surface.

Other countries have recognized that in order to act in accordance with their own bill of rights and practice what they preach in terms of non-discrimination, they must have accessible currency. Not having any is arguably the highest form of instituational discrimination.

It's only recently that processes have been set in motion to make accessible currency a reality in the U.S. The American Council of the Blind won a lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury in May 2008, demanding that they make their currency accessible in accordance with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 as soon as possible.

Of course that's extremely vague, the first time we see accessible currency in the U.S. will be whenever the next currency redesign is (possibly five to eight years from now), but with the economy in shambles it's easy to put a ruling like this on the back burner. The treasury still has an opportunity to Appeal, so who knows.

Just be thankful you live in Canada where banks issue free bill reading machines to the blind. The U.S. is a country where the Bank of America has made significant strides in making ATM machines accessible through braille keys and audio menu delivery, but it takes this long to even think about making the money that is spit from the machine accessible? However, the U.S. Treasury has to be sued before they'll even consider it. What's up with that?

Aaron is a freelance journalist living in Toronto. His work has appeared in Financial Post Business, Investment Executive Newspaper, and TV Week Magazine, along with Askmen.com. He is a regular contributor to Abilities Magazine and is currently plotting a weekly web comic called GIMP, with artist Jon Duguay, about a handicap school bus driver who wakes up after a crash to find he's the last able-bodied person on earth — and he's being hunted.

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