Currency design in the United States and abroad: counterfeit deterrence and visual accessibility

Despite the increasing use of electronic payments, currency retains an important role in the payment system of every country. In this article, the authors compare and contrast trade-offs among currency design features, including those primarily intended to deter counterfeiting and those to improve usability by the visually impaired. The authors conclude that periodic changes in the design of currency are an important aspect of counterfeit deterrence and that currency designers worldwide generally have been successful in efforts to deter counterfeiting. At the same time, currency designers have sought to be sensitive to the needs of the visually impaired. Although trade-offs among goals sometimes have forced compromises, new technologies promise banknotes that are both more difficult to counterfeit and more accessible to the visually impaired. Among the world's currencies, U.S. banknotes are the notes most widely used outside their country of issue and thus require special consideration.Paper money design - United States ; Money

Handicapping currency design: counterfeit deterrence and visual accessibility in the United States and abroad

Despite the increasing use of electronic payments, currency retains an important role in the payments system of every country. Two aspects of currency usage drive currency design worldwide: deterring counterfeiting and making paper currency accessible to the visually impaired. Further, among the world's currencies, only U.S. banknotes are widely owned and used in transactions outside their country of issue (although the euro also has some external circulation). In this article, we compare and contrast major currencies and their design features. We conclude that the designs of the two most widely used currencies in the world-the U.S. dollar and the euro-have successfully deterred counterfeiting; data on other currencies are not public. We also conclude that, among the world's major currencies, U.S. banknotes have the fewest features to assist the visually impaired.Paper money design ; Coinage ; Counterfeits and counterfeiting

Working Effectively with People who are Blind or Visually Impaired

This brochure on peoples who are blind or visually impaired and The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is one of a series on human resources practices and workplace accommodations for persons with disabilities edited by Susanne M. Bruyère, Ph.D., CRC, SPHR, Director, Program on Employment and Disability, School of Industrial and Labor Relations – Extension Division, Cornell University. Cornell University was funded in the early 1990’s by the U.S. Department of Education National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research as a National Materials Development Project on the employment provisions (Title I) of the ADA (Grant #H133D10155). These updates, and the development of new brochures, have been funded by Cornell’s Program on Employment and Disability

A robust braille recognition system

Braille is the most effective means of written communication between visually-impaired and sighted people. This paper describes a new system that recognizes Braille characters in scanned Braille document pages. Unlike most other approaches, an inexpensive flatbed scanner is used and the system requires minimal interaction with the user. A unique feature of this system is the use of context at different levels (from the pre-processing of the image through to the post-processing of the recognition results) to enhance robustness and, consequently, recognition results. Braille dots composing characters are identified on both single and double-sided documents of average quality with over 99% accuracy, while Braille characters are also correctly recognised in over 99% of documents of average quality (in both single and double-sided documents)

A Fuzzy Approach to Text Segmentation in Web Images Based on Human Colour Perception

This chapter describes a new approach for the segmentation of text in images on Web pages. In the same spirit as the authors’ previous work on this subject, this approach attempts to model the ability of humans to differentiate between colours. In this case, pixels of similar colour are first grouped using a colour distance defined in a perceptually uniform colour space (as opposed to the commonly used RGB). The resulting colour connected components are then grouped to form larger (character-like) regions with the aid of a propinquity measure, which is the output of a fuzzy inference system. This measure expresses the likelihood for merging two components based on two features. The first feature is the colour distance between the components, in the L*a*b* colour space. The second feature expresses the topological relationship of two components. The results of the method indicate a better performance than previous methods devised by the authors and possibly better (a direct comparison is not really possible due to the differences in application domain characteristics between this and previous methods) performance to other existing methods

A framework for accessible m-government implementation

The great popularity and rapid diffusion of mobile technologies at worldwide level has also been recognised by the public sector, leading to the creation of m-government. A major challenge for m-government is accessibility – the provision of an equal service to all citizens irrespective of their psychical, mental or technical capabilities. This paper sketches the profiles of six citizen groups: Visually Impaired, Hearing Impaired, Motor Impaired, Speech Impaired, Cognitive Impaired and Elderly. M-government examples that target the aforementioned groups are discussed and a framework for accessible m-government implementation with reference to the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices is proposed

ENHANCED WEARABLE DEVICES FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED USERS

Systems and methods are disclosed for enhanced wearable devices for visually impaired users. A system of enhanced wearable devices may comprise a first plurality of wearable devices located on a user, and a second plurality of wearable devices located on a service animal. The first plurality of wearable devices may include at least a pair of smart glasses, such as augmented reality or virtual reality glasses, and one or more sensors, such as an accelerometer, a gyroscope, an image sensor, an acoustics sensor, GPS sensors, or the like. Each wearable device of the second plurality of wearable devices may be attached to the service animal via a collar, a leash, a vest, a harness, or the like. A processor of the system may receive first information indicating an environment surrounding the user from the first plurality of wearable devices and second information indicating an environment surrounding the service animal from the second plurality of wearable devices. The first and second information may be used to determine a combined environment of the user and the service animal. A hazard may be identified in the combined environment. An alert, which may be based on the hazard and recognizable by the user, such as through vibrations, audio notification, or other sensory type notification, may be generated and sent to the user