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12/18/06 Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Karla Gilbride (via Contact Us)
Washington, D.C., December 18 - OurMoneyToo, an independent group of blind and sighted volunteers working for accessible paper currency in the United States, was disappointed to learn that the Department of Justice is planning to appeal the November 28 district court ruling that U.S. banknotes must be made distinguishable by touch. The group was hoping that the Treasury would choose to work with interested blindness advocates to design a modification to bills that would be both cost-effective and useful to blind and visually impaired people, as the governments of Canada and the European Union did when tactile features were added to Canadian banknotes and euros. While this delay is unfortunate, the group remains confident that Judge Robertson's decision will ultimately be upheld, because the government's arguments against it lack meritOurMoneyToo, an independent group of blind and sighted volunteers working for accessible paper currency in the United States, was disappointed to learn that the Department of Justice is planning to appeal the November 28 district court ruling that U.S. banknotes must be made distinguishable by touch. The group was hoping that the Treasury would choose to work with interested blindness advocates to design a modification to bills that would be both cost-effective and useful to blind and visually impaired people, as the governments of Canada and the European Union did when tactile features were added to Canadian banknotes and euros. While this delay is unfortunate, the group remains confident that Judge Robertson's decision will ultimately be upheld, because the government's arguments against it lack merit.
For example, one objection that the Treasury Department has raised is that any design change making paper money distinguishable by touch will be too expensive to implement. Judge Robertson's opinion pointed out, however, that the government's initial cost estimates for some of the tactile features suggested in the lawsuit would add less than 5% to what the Treasury Department already spends on currency production each year. In addition, the government's cost estimates are severely inflated because they assume that tactile features will be added separately from the currency redesign projects already underway, even though many advocates for tactile features suggest simply making the changes as part of the next scheduled redesign process for each denomination. The government's figures also include the costs of redesigning the one-dollar bill. Approximately half of the bills produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing each year are one-dollar bills, and, according to court documents, the American Council of the Blind is not asking for one-dollar bills to be changed at this time. Leaving one-dollar bills out of the redesign process would also avoid the need for a refitting of any vending machines and payment devices that only accept one-dollar bills.
The government has also suggested that blind and visually impaired people already have meaningful access to money because they can use folding systems, electronic bill readers, or credit cards to handle their financial transactions. While most blind Americans have learned to keep track of their money by folding their bills in different ways or keeping them in different places in their wallets, they must still rely on sighted people or bill-reading machines to tell them which bills are which when receiving them for the first time.
Hand-held electronic bill reading devices, which currently retail for nearly $300, are an unacceptable solution compared with adding tactile features to the bills themselves, according to Georgetown law student and OurMoneyToo member Karla Gilbride. "I've tried using bill readers in the past, and I found the experience extremely frustrating. The reader won't recognize a bill unless you insert it in the proper orientation (which there's no way to tell if you're blind), it can't identify older bills that have since been redesigned, and even with newer bills, if they've been wrinkled or damaged it often isn't able to read them at all. Even if bill reader technology could be improved, requiring people to carry around an extra piece of equipment just to read their money makes no sense when we already know, from their use in other countries, of methods that would allow blind people to identify the bills themselves as quickly and easily as sighted people can."
To ask blind people to make all of their purchases with credit cards is also unreasonable, adds Jonathan Simeone, an OurMoneyToo member who works as an attorney in Washington, D.C. "Not every business accepts credit cards, and not everyone even owns a credit card-whether out of concern about identity theft or for other reasons. I also find this argument especially ironic because most of the devices that people have to use when making credit or debit card purchases at stores are themselves inaccessible to blind people, because they have flat touch screens and there's no way to tell by feel where the required buttons are."
Finally, contrary to the government's contention that this change would somehow aid counterfeiters, adding tactile features would actually make U.S. currency harder to counterfeit, according to David Spector, a software engineer in Waltham, Mass. who designed the OurMoneyToo.org website. "One of the reasons that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is currently redesigning the five-dollar bill is because some counterfeiters have discovered a way to bleach the ink off a five-dollar bill and overprint it to look like a hundred-dollar bill. That wouldn't be possible if the five-dollar bill and the hundred-dollar bill were different sizes. The government might also create tactile markings using technology that is difficult for counterfeiters to reproduce. As Judge Robertson noted in his opinion, the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank consider the tactile features on euros and Swiss banknotes to double as security features because they are so hard to replicate."
OurMoneyToo was founded in 2004 to educate the public about the benefits of tactilely distinguishable currency for blind and visually impaired people as well as sighted people using cash in low-light settings. The group has conducted events and media interviews, and has a website at www.ourmoneytoo.org which contains personal accounts from blind and visually impaired people about their experiences with inaccessible U.S. currency.