A high school club from Maryland has received an $8000 grant from an MIT-administered program.

The grant will fund the efforts of the club to create a device that promises to help blind people identify and sort paper currency.

John Stansbury, a former software engineer turned math and computer science teacher at Poolesville High School in Maryland, is leading the effort.

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"What we wanted to do was build a wallet billfold device- about that size, we are hoping- that you would take the bill, and feed into it, like a printer feeding paper in, and it would the denomination," Stansbury said.

He added that there are currently no good solutions, saying that the aim of the device is to help boost the independence of blind people.

The current solution involves a visually impaired person folding different denominations of money in unique ways, using a currency identification smartphone app like MoneyReader which identifies each bill using the camera and then speaks it loudly using the device's speaker. A device called ibill identifies the bills one at a time.

The device that Stansbury and his team are building is expected to identify more than one bill.

Advocates of the blind have, however, expressed frustration that such solutions are even necessary. This led to a lawsuit by the American Council of the Blind against the Secretary of the Treasury in 2008.

The advocates won the case, with the federal court ruling that the U.S government was violating a law called the Rehabilitation Act with its inaccessible currency.

More than eight years later, advocates are still frustrated by the fact that there still not a single currency that is accessible to the blind.

However, the Department of Treasury maintains that they are already ensuring "meaningful access" for the blind.

At the present moment, advocates for the blind say that the current solutions fall short of real meaningful access.

Tagsblind, currency, technology