What adaptable item do many countries worldwide have that we in the United States don’t? If you guessed paper money, you’d be right. Most countries have some form of identification on their currency that makes it easy for people who are blind or low-vision to quicly transact business or sales on the spot without having to pull out a bill identifier or app on their smart phone.
Now, granted, talking bill identifiers have been around for a long, long time and are very helpful. An example is I-Bill which many of us have used to sort the cash in our wallets. However, we would like to make our transactions as quickly as anyone else standing in line at the store. Of course, we can pull out the good old credit or debit card. I do it all the time and pay for a lot of things with plastic.
But even with more business being conducted by the bar coded plastic, we still want to remain a cash handling community. Cash is legal tender after all. That, along with getting Harriet Tubman’s pic on the $20.00 bill was on many people’s minds when marching on March 10 , 223. As members of various disability rights organizations marched, they chanted and called for the United States Treasury to start minting currency that will allow us to distinguish between 1’s, 5’s, 10’s 20’s, and so forth.
You can read the press release linked here.
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Boldly Blind 