Screening and quantitative color blindness tests

While screening tests can only find out a color vision problem, detailed quantitative tests can determine its severity.

During a comprehensive eye exam, you will always receive the Ishihara Color Vision Test for color blindness test, which is the most widely applied screening test invented by the Japanese ophthalmologist Shinobu Ishihara. The booklet of the test consists of typically 38 plates of many dots of various colors, brightness and sizes. Normal people can see clear numbers through these dots, which is beyond individuals with color blindness. Other abbreviated versions of this test comprise only 14 or 24 plates.

For further color blindness test, a popular test named Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue Test is available. While simulating natural daylight by using a viewing booth, the test requires the person to arrange many disordered hues on disks into a gradually changing hue. All colored disks are numbered on the bottom in order to determine how closely that the person’s result match the right sequence, thus his accurate color perception and color blindness severity can be evaluated. These disks should be replaced every two years, in case of color saturation loss. A precise version named Farnsworth-Munsell D15 Test containing 15 colored disks is also created as another screening test.

Electricians, commercial artists, designers, technicians and certain manufacturing and marketing individuals always need accurate color perception for better work performance. Color blindness is mostly born so that many people are unaware of it in daily lives. It is exciting that special tinted contact lenses may improve people’s color perception abilities.

The most critical factor in color tests in the exact color representation, so that many people suspect the results performed by online color tests. Color tests from eye doctors are more trustful, since they provide standardized materials under proper lighting.