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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Many countries are particular about currency being pristine. I remember in Austria it used to be forbidden even to fold their currency (old currency; not Euros). Had to be kept in a wallet; the wallet had to be large enough to hold the larger bills (different bills had different sizes!)

https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/austria-and-old-banknotes-...

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Yup different bill sizes is a very simple security feature to prevent bleaching a bill and printing a higher denomination on it. This works because the higher the value the bigger the bill and forging the paper itself is hard.

Seems like it would also be a nice feature for the visually impaired.

On modern colour notes one conventional way to help the visually impaired is to make the note have a distinctive colour theme. Most countries do this, and I believe the latest US notes finally have at least subtle coloured elements.

[Gets out British "paper" money that hasn't been touched since the lockdown started months ago because who pays cash now?]

As well as being different sizes, my £10 notes are orange, while the £20 is purple. The tenners have this big orange splodge that's actually a book with the initials JA (Jane Austen) and the twenty has a purple splodge whose meaning might be obvious to me if I liked art enough (relating to Turner, a famous British painter).

Comparing sizes is hard to do quickly, whereas you can see instantly if the money you're trying to pay with or receiving in change is the wrong colour.

"whereas you can see instantly if the money you're trying to pay with or receiving in change is the wrong colour."

Now try that when you're blind.

The new polymer notes do include considerations for the vision-impaired.

Check out the "tactile feature" section on the various banknotes at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/current-banknotes

While we don't use tactile features in Australia, similar consultation went into the design of our banknotes: https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2015/mar/1.html

In australia the new bills do have tactile dots to distinguish them for people living with blindness. About halfway along the bottom of the new 5 you can feel it.

The vast majority of visually impaired people are not literally blind and that's really important when designing for the general population. If you force everybody whose sight has deteriorated to the point where they can't read text to resort to feeling note sizes you're missing a vast middle ground of people who'd have been served by just choosing a different colour for each denomination.

Isn't the rule in the US that any bill that's more than 50% there can be exchanged for a new one? Obviously it has to be that way to avoid people ripping their money in two.

Acceptable damage is just 33% actually.

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