thielges@uiucdcsb.UUCP (11/06/84)
How do blind people tell the difference between denominations of American paper money ? Has the government ever taken any steps to make sightless identification easier ? Bart Thielges
cunningh@noscvax.UUCP (Robert P. Cunningham) (11/06/84)
The Bank of Japan and Japan's finance ministry is now issuing new banknotes in the 10,000 yen, 5,000 yen, and 1,000 yen denominations. The new bank notes are smaller (roughly the size of U.S. currency), and more resistant to counterfeiting than their predecessors. The new notes use special inks that will not copy correctly, even if run through the most sophisticated of today's color copying machines. They feature uneven watermarks so that the blind can tell one note from another. Some 300,000 machines that handle bank notes in Japan -- vending equipment and so on -- have been converted to recognize the new notes within the last six months. As old bills come back to banks, they will be withdrawn from circulation and replaced with new ones. After the annual payment of cash bonuses to workers at the end of the year, most of the old notes will be gone and replaced by the new ones. If you have old Japanese paper money, don't worry; they will still be legal tender indefinitely...although they probably won't work in vending machines after next year or so. The new notes feature persons "of cultural merit" rther than political figures: Yukichi Fukuzawa on the 10,000 yen note, Inazo Nitobe on the 5,000 yen note, and Soseki Natsume on the 1,000 note.
mcdonald@smu.UUCP (11/08/84)
I've heard of paper money being marked in braille. You'd have to have someone
help you prepare an entire day's supply before you left home and trust
people giving you change.
I'm not sure about this. Does it sound practical to you?
On the SMU campus, mainly due to the efforts of one student, all the soft
drink machines have Braille labels on the buttons. The ramifications can
be mind-boggling.
McD