A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the United States is discriminating blind people through its paper money, as their different values are almost impossible to distinguish.

The decision upholds a previous decision by a lower court in 2006 and is possible to force the US Treasury to react and redesign its bills. There are two possibilities in order to make the money be appropriate for the use by blind people: either they will make them different in size, or they print them with raised markings.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit finally ruled in favor for the American Council for the Blind, which has fought this case for almost six years.

Mitch Pomerantz, the council's president, said that blind people find it difficult and unfair to be forced to rely on other people to tell them what money they have and how to use them.

Even if it acknowledged that the bill system is discriminating, the US argued that blind people have adapted by using different modalities in order to recognize bills. They sometimes folded a little corner of the bills or used clerks’ help. But most of them use credit cards.

The court agreed that such adaptations are not enough to make things fair, but it does not have the power to decide how to redesign the bills. The US Treasury Department is now forced to address the problem, which was called a discriminatory problem by the court.