American visually impaired people asserted their rights, including the ability to pay independently in stores, back in the spring of 2002. According to attorney Jeffrey Lovitsky of the American Council of the Blind, blind customers, unable to distinguish a one-dollar bill from a hundred-dollar bill due to their identical size, have to rely on the goodwill of store staff. Some blind Americans resort to certain tricks to determine the denomination of a banknote on their own. For example, council member Melanie Brunson told the court that she folds money differently: she leaves one-dollar bills unfolded, folds five-dollar bills in half horizontally, tens vertically, and $20 bills four times. Special electronic devices for identifying banknotes, according to citizens, are too slow and unreliable for the blind, and also expensive. And despite the fact that cases of cheating blind customers, according to Jeffrey Lovitsky, are very rare in the US, blind people have to endure a lot of inconvenience and humiliation when asking passersby for help. «It is extremely unfair that my clients have to rely on the honest intentions of people they have never met before and not know whether they received the correct change,» the attorney stated. «Changing the form of banknotes will give blind people greater independence.» The council offered authorities the choice to diversify banknotes by size, provide them with raised dots, or use intaglio printing.
The attorney’s complaints about the excessively uniform dollars seem to have moved Federal Judge James Robertson, who last week granted the lawsuit of the American Council of the Blind and ordered the authorities to make corresponding changes to the design of dollar bills. He was not swayed by government lawyers’ statements that «changing the size or structure of banknotes will complicate the Treasury’s work in preventing counterfeiting.»
According to the judge’s verdict, «of more than 180 countries that issue paper money, only the United States prints banknotes identical in size and color across all denominations, and more than 100 countries have banknotes that differ in size or have other features that allow them to be distinguished by touch.» In the judge’s opinion, such global practice shows that the adaptation of national currency for the disabled, as proposed by blind Americans, is entirely feasible.
Until now, the only reason for changing the appearance of the national currency of Americans was combating counterfeiters. In 1990, microprinting and security threads appeared on banknotes; in 1996, the portraits on banknotes were enlarged, and dollars became «sensitive» to infrared light. Until 2003, when the first colored $20 banknotes appeared, only different shades of green were used. Since 2006, yellow, red, and orange colors have also adorned the ten-dollar bill. The size of the banknotes themselves has not changed since 1929, when the uniform standard of American money was reduced by 30% to cut printing costs and protect against counterfeiting.
It seems American officials are not eager to spend money, since according to their calculations, redesigning the currency in the interests of the blind will cost the budget a pretty penny. The corresponding equipment modernization is estimated at a one-time expenditure of $75 to $178 million, and an additional $50 million will be required annually to produce banknotes of different sizes. However, according to the judge, the costs of changing banknotes to meet the plaintiffs’ requirements will not exceed 5% of the current Treasury spending on printing American money. And he considers such losses justified.