New Bills Proposed To Aid Blind But Most Popular Suggestions Are Too Expensive, Impractical

Charlie Davis, who runs a snack shop in the basement of the Treasury Department, can’t see the money his customers give him for sodas, candy and potato chips.

Davis is blind. His clientele is honest, and a sighted co-worker straightens out the occasional mistake, but Davis wouldn’t mind if the government made it easier for him to handle paper currency. “Everybody who’s blind has had problems if they deal with money,” Davis said.

In work spaces three floors above Davis, Treasury officials are considering ways to make the nation’s currency more accessible for the 200,000 blind Americans and the 3.5 million with impaired vision.

The officials already have ruled out as too expensive or impractical the changes many blind people consider most desirable. Sources familiar with the effort say those include issuing bills in different sizes for different denominations, or incorporating a feature such as Braille that can be felt with the fingers.

The new $100 bill introduced a year ago has no special features for the blind. The sources said Treasury is considering two changes, however, for new $50 notes due out in the fall and for redesigned smaller denominations due in subsequent years.

The sources spoke on condition of anonymity. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin has not finally accepted the changes, and department officials are keeping details under wraps until then.

One of the proposed changes would be aimed at the partially sighted, the other at the blind.

A preliminary design of the new $50, like the current bill, has a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant on the front. On the reverse, it features an enlarged numeral 50 in the lower right, printed in solid green ink, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The numeral is no longer part of the border engraving but is surrounded by blank space.

“Improving the contrast. That’s the key to making things more readable for a low-vision person,” said Oral Miller, executive director of the American Council of the Blind, which has advocated changes for 25 years.

The government also plans to place a polymer security thread to the right of Grant’s portrait, one source said. In the new $100 note, the thread is on the left of Benjamin Franklin’s portrait, except for about $4.6 million accidentally misprinted last year.

Placing the thread, which glows red under ultraviolet light, in different locations for each denomination would allow bills to be identified more easily by electronic bill readers used by some blind people.

Miller said that won’t help much unless the cost of bill readers, now hundreds of dollars, can be reduced to an affordable $25 or so.

But the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind eschews special favors.

“If we spread the word that you can’t get along if you’re blind unless something special is done for you, then it will make it more difficult to get jobs for the blind,” said federation president Marc Maurer.

“Everything has to be thought out carefully to come up with something that addresses the problem without creating a new one,” said Thomas A. Ferguson, assistant director for research at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving.

Kawika Daguio of the American Bankers Association said his group’s concern had been a possible change in bill size, which would force retooling of equipment from automated teller machines to cash drawers.

“We said, ‘Don’t do anything that’s going to be incompatible with our current systems and especially don’t do anything (such as Braille marks) that will cause the bills to jam in our machines,”’ he said.