How can you recognize coins if you can’t see them?

Before answering this question, I need to clear a couple of things here. I love independence. It really bothers me when I need to depend on other people for no reason. There is a time and place when you ask for help, we all do. But being blind, I feel that sometimes I need to ask for more help than others. Now, why did I pick a hobby that one would associate with being able to see, or if you can’t see, it requires help.

I’m the first one to admit, there is a stage in recognizing the coin when vision is required. Once you learn to recognize a particular coin by touch, the next identical one is easy to tell. However, writing is so small even on large coins that you cannot spell it with your finger. I need somebody to give me enough information about a coin to get me started.
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What made me interested?

Partly it was the challenge. Little or big. This is something that never changed in my life. I enjoy taking a concept and develop it. Not to completion, to me nothing is completed. Only finished. And this fits very well into coin collecting.

Imagine that you close your eyes and hold a piece of metal in your hand. That’s a piece of metal, nothing else. Then you start examining it; it has a shape, a texture, weight size, smell, etc. It is still just a coin, it could be anything. Real, fake, old or new, you may even find out that it isn’t really a coin just a piece of metal.
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How it started

Tom the blind coin collector

It was one of the usual coin collecting stories. I was about six when I got a plastic treasure chest. I really wanted it, but then I had no idea what to store in there. After bugging my mom for a while, she gave me a handful of coins which they brought back from Czechoslovakia from a recent trip. I put them into the treasure chest and declared that I’m collecting coins.
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