5 Online Color Blindness Tests

• Posted by Daniel Flück on October 7th, 2007 filed in Tests
• 14 Comments »

Do you ever wanted to test your color vision? Are you not sure if you might suffer from some type of color vision deficiency? Here are five ways to test online if you are colorblind or not and also to give you a clue about the type of your color blindness.

Color blindness tests are often used check if you fulfill some job requirements. Certain professions like police officer or pilot most often require very good color vision. But also a lot of mothers are curious about the color vision of their children.

The following five checks are quite different but serve the same purpose. So if you take a few of them—or even all five—you will get a quite complete picture of your color vision abilities. Please add your thoughts, ideas and maybe even your test results in the comments section.

Ishihara Plate

1. Ishihara plates color blindness test. This plates are named after a Japanese professor and by far the best known test for red-green color blindness. They are made out of many colored circles and are showing a number, which can only be seen if you are not colorblind. The test can tell you if you either are red- or green-blind, but can’t tell you a lot about the severity of your color blindness. Ishihara plates are often used by eye doctors to check for color blindness.

D-15 Color Blindness Test

2. Farnsworth Dichotomous Test (D-15). The Farnsworth D-15 test is also a very well known and belongs to a category of color blindness tests called Color Arrangement Tests. All these tests are based on different colors—in this case 15 of them, sometimes consisting of up to 100 different hues—which have to be arranged in the correct order. According to the order you choose a tester can find out if you are suffering from a red-, green- or blue-color deficiency.

City University Color Vision Test

3. City University Dynamic Colour Vision Test. Professor John L. Barbur from the City University London does a lot of research in the area of color vision and color blindness. He and his team developed a computer color vision test based on the same principle as the Ishihara test. They are offering the City University Online Color Vision Test also on the web in a very simplified version. The City University color vision test is good to test for any type of color blindness.

Color Blindness Test at biyee.net

4. Color Vision Test at Biyee.net. This great online test has no long history or well known institute in the background. It is simply a Color Blindness Test based on Confusion Lines of the CIE 1931 Color Space. But a very good one which is available online. You have three different tests, one for each type of color vision deficiency: protan, deutan and tritan defects. And the test results tell you a lot more about the type of color blindness you are suffering from.

Color Blindness Test – Color Match

5. Multiple Choice Color Vision Test. The French optician Jean Jouannic offers an Online Multiple Choice Color Blindness Test based on 31 images. The images are either hidden signs and letters or a handful of colors which you have to match to a choice of color names. As colorblind people show great difficulties matching color names to colors, this is another appropriate method to test color vision. The test has some nice statistics when you have finished and tries to quantify your color blindness in detail.

You should know, that all online color blindness tests are not truly reliable. Because of different display settings, display gamma values and ambient light situations you can’t rely on the results of online color vision deficiency tests. They will show you the direction, but for a reliable result you have to visit an eye specialist.