“All money, no matter how much it’s worth, feels the same.” — Frank Welte, a 45-year-old blind man

Sarah SilvermanHey ladies, do we have any Sarah Silverman fans out there? She’s hot and funny in a raw sort of way. However, she’s probably not the girl that you’d want to bring home to mom. According to Time magazine, “She’s a beautiful woman, but her sensibility is very male.” She also demonstrates what they describe as “clueless insensitivities to minorities, the disabled and the elderly.”

For this reason, I’m sure she’d have something off color to share about a federal district judge ruling that American dollars violate the federal Rehabilitation Act. Can’t you just hear her telling a joke about blind people and money?

But their challenge isn’t really a laughing matter. American bills (with our various denominations) are the same size so how do blind people tell them apart? As Roger Parloff in Fortune magazine writes, “Blind people typically determine the denominations of paper money by using bill-reading machines or by asking sighted people a bill’s value and then folding the various denominations in different ways.”

This ruling has put some advocacy groups against each other. For example, “The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) denounced the judge’s ruling as ‘dangerously misguided’ and pledged to support the Treasury’s appeal of it. The NFB’s president, Dr. Marc Maurer, issued a statement arguing that ‘blind people transact business with paper money every day’ and don’t need ‘feel-good gimmicks that misinform the public about our capabilities.’ The NFB’s fear is that special treatment may hurt the chances of blind people being taken seriously by businesses.”

OurMoneyToo.org posed these three questions about the issue:

1. What are you trying to achieve through this effort?
“We are hoping to convince the federal government of the value to society as a whole and to blind people in particular of paper currency that is truly distinguishable by touch.”

2. Isn’t unemployment a bigger, more pressing problem for people who are blind than inaccessible money?
“Keep in mind that some jobs require people to accept cash on a regular basis. Being able to tell bills apart without assistance would make it much easier for a blind person to perform these jobs.”

3. How do blind people use money now if it is so inaccessible?
“Blind people use several techniques for organizing money once they receive it. One common method is to fold each denomination in a different way. For example, ones might not be folded at all, while fives are folded in half widthwise, tens folded once in half lengthwise, twenties folded twice, etc. There are also wallets with separate compartments for each type of bill and devices for marking currency with raised dots. While these systems help blind people to handle money more easily, the fact that there is no way to tell the bills apart when receiving change means that no matter how organized they are, blind people still have to rely on a sighted person or a machine to identify each bill for them before they can file it away using the system of their choice.”

Justin Berton at the San Francisco Chronicle writes, “A National Academy of Sciences study in 1995 found that of the 180 countries that issue paper currency, only the United States printed all denominations of bills the same size. The study suggested the Treasury Department could both prevent counterfeiting and assist low-vision and blind Americans by enlarging fonts and varying the bill sizes. Euros, for example, increase in length and height for each value. When the U.S. bill underwent redesigns in 1996 and 2004, numerals were enlarged so low-vision users could easily distinguish the bills.”

The U.S. is the only country not taking any steps to make denominations legible to the blind. And I’m sure Silverman would have something funny to say about that.