Accessible Currency Promises Improved Daily Lives and Increased Employability for People Who Are Blind, and It’s One More Item on Secretary Paulson’s To-Do List

By Penny Reeder 

Hank Paulson has a lot on his to-do list, what with trying to figure out how to spend seven hundred billion dollars, and sorting out the possibly good mortgages from the probably bad mortgages, and having to appear several times each day before banks of TV cameras, alternately reassuring and not reassuring the public about the bail out (ummm “rescue”) package…  So, it may be understandable to some that his department hasn’t gotten around to delivering accessible currency to the nation’s 21.2  million citizens who report that they have trouble seeing (www.afb.org/stats.).  Neither he nor his boss apparently thought making paper currency accessible was a worthy goal in the first place –The Bush Administration appealed the 2006 judgment that Section 504 of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires the United States Treasury to make paper money accessible to people who cannot discern the denominational value of their currency visually.  Then, when Paulson lost the appeal, the department  hemmed and hawed and allowed as to how they needed time to figure out just how to make our money accessible (despite the fact that more than 180 other countries in the world figured it out a long time ago). 

The length of Paulson’s to-do list notwithstanding (Is he really the most powerful man in the world?), on October 3, U. S. District Judge, James Robertson, whose 2006 decision in the currency case was upheld in May, decreed that Paulson and his department must, not merely promise to abide by the court’s decision, but that they must stop delaying implementation of the order, right now.  So, the next time the Treasury Department prints a boatload of new paper money, (Apparently, this is a relatively frequent obligation in order to foil the dastardly goals of any potential counterfeiters lurking in our midst.) all of those bills will be independently identifiable by non-visual means. Furthermore, Judge Robertson expects the Treasury to furnish a status report on their progress toward releasing money that doesn’t discriminate against anyone, beginning in March of 2009.  That’s about five months away, so Paulson needs to move that accessible currency item way up on his to-do list.

This is good news for every person in the country who is blind or visually impaired; having the ability to independently identify paper currency will measurably improve the quality of our daily lives, and make all of us instantly more employable.

One benefit that comes immediately to our minds is that people may be far less likely to rip us off.  Somewhere there’s probably a formal report which summarizes the widely suspected experiences of people who are blind concerning the frequency with which they have been handed the wrong change, for example,  from a bill which they thought was a five, when it was really a twenty – or worse something even bigger.  I can’t find that survey, although I’m sure I read the report, not all that long ago.  But, my own informal survey of friends who have trouble seeing, or can’t see anything at all, indicates that most of us have had that kind of experience at least once in a while.  Those occurrences, whether caused by intention or accident, should now diminish.

And, another plus, our retail transactions will take a lot less time.  If the person who checks me out at Trader Joe’s doesn’t have to identify each of the bills that constitute my change from the three 20s I retrieved from the ATM and handed to her in payment for my stuff, and the person behind me in line doesn’t have to twiddle his thumbs while I conscientiously fold the fives in half, the tens in half twice, and store the ones flat in a separate pocket in my wallet, the line will move more quickly, and the shopping experience will be more serene for all of us.

These are desirable outcomes for everyone who is blind or visually impaired, but the most exciting result may be that a whole new job category will be opened to people who are blind– the arena of retail sales!  Yes, I know there are blind vendors, they operate cafeterias and other facilities often in government-owned buildings completely independently.  Yes, they handle paper currency, usually relying on their customers to tell them the denominations of the bills they are handing them, and seldom, if ever, relying on electronic money identifiers because it simply takes these gadgets too long to convey information about a bill via synthetic speech. Many make a good living, and many hire people with other kinds of disabilities to help them.  The Randolph-Sheppard Vending Program, in business since 1936, has equaled opportunity and self sufficiency for a few thousand people whose entrance into the program was facilitated by state vocational rehabilitation programs across the country.  It’s Rehab. That sets these folks up in business; it’s Rehab that provides their training, purchases their talking cash registers and their bar code readers and accessible computers and appliances; and it’s Rehab that finds suitable venues for new vending facilities and administers a program that, unfortunately,  decreases in size every year.  If a person is a consumer of vocational rehabilitation services, then he or she may be able to become one of the “blind vendors.”  But, if food service is not your particular cup of tea, or if there aren’t any new Randolph-Sheppard locations in your particular area of the country, or if you need to be able to drive to get to vending facilities that rely upon stocking and retrieving the proceeds from automatic vending machines that are often stashed in quick-stop venues along interstate highways, or if you’re too old or too young or too anything to qualify for vocational rehabilitation services, then retail may well be outside your realm of employment possibilities if you’re a person who can’t see.  At least today.

Tomorrow, however, after Secretary Paulson gets that accessible currency item on his to-do list accomplished, the money handling occupations in DOL’s Occupational Outlook Handbook may well fall into your realm of job possibilities.  Imagine yourself as a blind or visually impaired teenager working alongside your sighted friends at the local fast-food restaurant.  It may not be anyone’s “dream job,” but that entry-level job can lead to other jobs, serve as a reference for your level of responsibility and skill, and, one day,  comprise a “typical” job history, something almost unheard of among people who are blind and visually impaired.

It seems to me that it’s currency, as much as credit, that enables our economy to function.  At the very least, it’s currency that allows most of us to buy and sell the items and services we need.  When paper currency is finally discernable for those of us who can’t read the printed numbers on our dollar bills, all of us who cannot see, or see well, will experience a new and improved level of independence, and one other important effect of Judge Robertson’s decision may well be a decline in the abysmal unemployment statistics (estimated by many to be above 70 percent) for people who are blind.

So, Secretary Paulson, please do what the judge has told you, and move that accessible currency  item on your to-do list closer to the top.  It’s important. And as long as you’re working on fixing the meltdown and mitigating the effects of what looks like may be a long period of recession, accomplishing that particular item will likely lessen the disastrous impact of recession for at least one small segment of the population of people with disabilities, those of us for whom United States currency has been inaccessible for far too long.