BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind

Subject: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: Rumncoke
Date: 06 Feb 10 - 05:09 PM

In Britain the different value notes are different sizes and colours - but when getting dollars for my daughter's visit to the US we found out that the notes are the just about identical except for the values.

How on earth does someone with poor vision tell what note is which - and is being short changed something they have to put up with?

Anne Croucher

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: Emma B
Date: 06 Feb 10 - 05:12 PM

When I was over in the US I spoke to someone who was totally blind about this.
He explained that he, and his friends, only ever used dollar bills and simply counted them out, one by one....

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 06 Feb 10 - 05:14 PM

I had been asking this question for years. Found this-

They have electronic readers that they can pass a bill through and it will tell them audibly the denomination. It works the same way that that vending machines do, and it's small enough to fit in their pocket. There is no need to rely on sighted people.

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: wysiwyg
Date: 06 Feb 10 - 05:20 PM

Yeh, a rel. new thingie.

The older way was for a sighted helper to batch-crease bills' corners in a coded way to keep the wallet sorted. That can easily be done by requesting packets of currency of all-one-denom per bundle from the bank, for the blind person to crease for themselves. They can set it up with a known fave teller to always give them their withdrawals that way, I bet. Just as Alzheimer pts can request 'scripts from pharm be filled in pill-sorters.

Gotta run,

~S~

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: Bill D
Date: 06 Feb 10 - 05:22 PM

Yes... in recent years, ever since they NEEDED to have a machine read 4 different notes for places like subway tickets, the technology has been improving. Not everyone has it, of course...some simply trust the clerks in certain places...or use ones.

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: bobad
Date: 06 Feb 10 - 05:30 PM

Canada's new bills have raised dots that tell the denomination, they also have high contrast, large numbers of the denomination, as well the Bank of Canada provides hand held bill readers for the visually impaired.

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: Rowan
Date: 06 Feb 10 - 08:37 PM

Of course, if the Oz system was introduced, they could use coins of different sizes for the $1 & $2 denominations; notes are textured plastic, coloured and with holograms.

But then "the almighty greenback" might be diminished unconscionably.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: Bert
Date: 06 Feb 10 - 08:41 PM

Shhh! Don't tell the American Government that there is a world out there.

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: Rumncoke
Date: 07 Feb 10 - 11:24 AM

Ah - thanks.

I suspect that here in the UK we get notes in change more often, giving a 20 pound note and getting back a 10 or a 5.

We also have gone to using coins for 1 and now 2 pounds, with the notes being 5, 10, 20 and 50 - though there was a spate of forgeries which now makes many people wary of taking a high denomination note. The new designs are rather pretty, with shiny bits.

Our wallets are deeper than American ones - my husband bought a wallet off eBay and found that it would not contain the UK notes, but it was fine for the dollars.

Maybe someone could inform the US Government that their money being all the same size and design makes it look like Monopoly money to the rest of the world -

Oh - hang on - I just had an awful thought....


You don't think it could be MEANT to?


Anne Croucher

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: Bill D
Date: 07 Feb 10 - 01:13 PM

I've been advocating dollar coins for years now, and printing more $2 bills....but when they finally did it, they made it so close to the size of a quarter, it was hard to tell the difference, and they refused to eliminate the dollar bill!.....and there is this STUPID superstition that $2 bills are 'bad luck'.

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: John Hardly
Date: 07 Feb 10 - 01:54 PM

It's fairly easy really. Once the US dollar reached a value in the minus column, asking how to sort bill denominations is like asking a person to divide another number by 0. I bought a Parker Brothers Monopoly™ game the other day. I added it up and figured out that, considering the price of the board game, Monopoly™ money has recently surpassed the US dollar in value.

They've started making Duraflame™ fireplace logs out of compressed $100 bills.

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: Bill D
Date: 07 Feb 10 - 02:23 PM

Just wait! (Hungarian currency after WWII)...[postage stamps were just as interesting)

from this page

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: Gurney
Date: 07 Feb 10 - 03:07 PM

John Hardly, many years ago, there was a set of plastic coins available from toyshops in Britain. There were all denominations, available separately, and the plastic pennies were in packs of 10, and cost a shilling. Real pennies were 12 to the shilling.
The caption on the pack was 'teach your children the value of money.'

When I was 'The man from the Pru' I collected from a blind guy. He always wanted all his change in coins, and complained if I hadn't enough to give him all coins.

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: Rapparee
Date: 07 Feb 10 - 03:13 PM

The "new" Sacajawea and presidential dollars can be told apart by feel. The government would LOVE to phase out the dollar bill and go to coins, but I understand the vending machine folks would take a big, big hit in changing out all their mechanisms.

I wouldn't mind going to loonies and so on.

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 07 Feb 10 - 03:49 PM

There actually has been some movement toward making US bills distinguishable by touch, and the US Treasury has a "study group" devoted to finding a reliable method. "Studies" have recently been reported as being "active and ongoing."

Whether or not this group has any active communication between members assigned to it is unconfirmable, and statements about whether the group has ever met together are ambiguous; but there is at least a pretense that advocates for the blind "can find" someone to whom they may complain.

Similar "efforts" have come and gone - or maybe the same continuing effort has just been ignored - since at least the 1950s if my memory serves me well enough that my recollection of "articles about" this isn't one of those things that "I remember despite having never known." I'm quite certain that people at the Perkins Institute were "optimistic" ca. 1960 when I had some communication (including some meetings) in connection with a "class project" to study the feasibility of a typewriter that would produce braille automatically when a sighted person typed "plain text" on it.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: Bill D
Date: 07 Feb 10 - 03:51 PM

"...can be told apart by feel."

Yes, if you are paying attention and use enough of each to stay in practice.

As to the govt., if they just quit USING dollar bills, the new coins would BE used...and if they made lots of $2 bills, one would never need to have more than ONE metal dollar at a time, if they chose.
Dollar coins could go in registers in the space where 50¢ pieces used to, and $2 bills where the ones were. It would save millions each year.

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: John Hardly
Date: 07 Feb 10 - 04:02 PM

"...can be told apart by feel."

It's one of the main reason we don't have women on any of our dollar bills. Besides the obvious and embarrassing-at-the-wrong-time experience of -- in public, no less -- feeling a woman to check the denomination, and getting....er...stimulated, the dilemma is compounded by the proximity of a man's pockets to the rising problem.

And it raises all kinds of strange observations: Like becoming a nation of straight men getting sexually aroused by feeling "Bills".

"Feeling Bill's what?"

"Hey, cowboy, you just counting your denominations, or are you happy to see me?"

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: Gurney
Date: 07 Feb 10 - 10:46 PM

Get well soon, John. :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: open mike
Date: 07 Feb 10 - 11:13 PM

one of the only places i have seen that uses dollar coins (besides slot machines in gambling casinos) is the stamp vending machines in the post office lobby--perhaps that is a gamble too?

Subject: RE: BS: Differentiating dollars if you're blind
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 07 Feb 10 - 11:39 PM

The US "Anthony Dollar" coin is not particularly easy to distinguish from a quarter coin. The dollar has "flats" around the edge while the quarter has a round serrated edge, but the flats on the dollar aren't particularly obvious to sight or touch.

I have two of the dollars, received fairly recently as quarters in change, that I didn't notice until I tried to give one of them to an exceedingly honest cashier as a quarter, and she pointed out to me that I had a "real quarter" I might give her instead.

The US nickel (5-cent) and quarter (25-cent) coins are almost identical in weight and very close to the same size, although the nickel has a smooth rim rather than the serrated one on the quarter. Many years ago some of the guys in the lab discovered that a nickel placed between solid steel plates and "pressed" under approximately 17,000 pounds would expand sufficiently to replicate the slightly larger diameter of the quarter, and since the weights are almost identical the "squashed nickels" would be accepted as quarters by the soft drink machines. (The machines probably are more sophisticated now.(?))

John