Sightless Spending

There's a move afoot to change American paper money to different sizes, so that blind people can tell one denomination from another. Singles one size, sawbucks another, jacksons yet another. This comes from a federal judge ruling that the current universal shape for all bills discriminates against the disabled and therefore violates the Federal Rehabilitation Act. Opponents point out that this would require a retooling of countless objects -- ATMs, vending machines, cash registers, even wallets. The costs for this conversion would be huge.

As usual, I have an idea. Granted it would cost too much to resize our currency. (I'm ignoring the success in Europe of introducing the Euro. I've no idea how painful that was for each of the countries involved to retool for the new money, but they did it.) A huge basis for that cost is in all the machinery that reads dollar bills. They would be rendered mechanically obsolete and would have to be completely replaced, every single one. This is because we have introduced machine vision and automated processing to vending machines.

My question is this: Why does the existence of automated computing technology at the point of sale have to be the root cause of such an expensive problem? Does it make sense to replace every single machine in order to accomodate a small minority of people? Or does it make just as much sense to use the techology to solve its own problem? In other words, why can't we make available small bill readers that people can carry with them and use to identify their own money?

Rather than retool the entire continent, we can instead embed electronically-readable markers in the bills that a small pocket device can read. Any person, blind or not, can identify paper money by passing each bill through or next to this small and inexpensive device. The problem is then solved much less expensively, and without recourse to a disruptive transition that will take years to coordinate and more years to get over. Each individual can deal with the situation as they see fit, in their own time.

The technology would not be terribly challenging. A combination of passive radio frequency response and optical identification can be built into a simple device for about the cost of an MP3 player. All that is really required is coordination with the Treasury, so that the new but same-sized bills can be produced appropriately. Who knows, maybe the new non-counterfeitable bills are already set up for this in some way.

Anyway, my rambling point is, don't turn the broad implementation of computing into a roadblock to the solution. Use a new broad implementation of computing as a better solution. It's not that hard, folks.