Colour Blind Test — 10-Plate Online Screening
Ten dot plates, each hiding a number. Set your screen to normal brightness and switch off night-shift filters first.
Practice plate — this one is visible whatever your colour vision.
Which number do you see?
Plates read
This is an entertainment screening on self-made plates. Screens vary in colour reproduction, so only a professional examination can give a real answer.
About the Colour Blind Test
This free Colour Blind Test shows you ten dot plates, each with a number hidden in the pattern. The plates are our own — drawn from scratch with original dot layouts and palettes that approximate the red-green confusion colours used in classic screening charts. People with typical colour vision read the numbers easily; people with red-green colour vision differences often see a different number, or none at all.
The first plate is a practice plate that everyone can read regardless of colour vision — it confirms your screen is showing the test properly. The nine that follow are the screening plates. At the end you get a simple count of how many you read, with guidance for each range.
One honest caveat, twice over: a screen is not a clinical chart. Brightness, night-mode filters, and panel quality all shift colours, and this page never diagnoses anything. Treat a surprising result as a reason to visit an eye clinic — where a real examination takes only minutes — not as an answer in itself.
How to take the test
- Turn off night-shift or blue-light filters and set brightness to a normal level. Take off tinted glasses or coloured contact lenses — a tint on the lens changes what you see here just as a screen filter does.
- Press Start — the practice plate appears first and should be easy for everyone. If you cannot read that one, the problem is almost certainly your screen or its settings, not your eyes.
- For each plate, tap the number you see, or “I don’t see a number”. If you genuinely cannot make one out, choose that instead of guessing: a lucky guess raises the count and makes the result less useful to you.
- Answer with your first impression; staring long at a plate distorts it.
- Read your count out of ten and the guidance for your range.
- If the result surprises you, check your screen settings and try once more.
Colour Blind Test FAQ
Is this the Ishihara test?
No. The Ishihara plates are a copyrighted clinical work. These ten plates are original — our own dot layouts, digit shapes, and palettes that approximate the same red-green confusion used in colour blindness screening, here for entertainment.
Can a screen test really detect colour blindness?
It can only hint. Every display reproduces colour differently, and filters or brightness shift the palette further. A consistent pattern across plates is worth following up at an eye clinic, where standardised printed charts and proper lighting give a real answer.
What does red-green colour vision difference mean?
The most common form of colour vision difference, affecting roughly 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women. Reds, greens, browns, and oranges look more similar than they do to typical eyes. It is inherited, harmless in daily life for most, and not a disease.
I read some plates but not others. Am I colour blind?
Not necessarily. Mixed results are the most common outcome of screen conditions rather than colour blindness — a warm night filter alone can hide several plates. Reset your display, retake once, and treat only a consistent pattern as meaningful.
How common is colour blindness, and why does it affect men more?
Red-green deficiency is the common one: it runs at roughly 8 per cent of men and half a per cent of women in populations of northern European descent. The lopsidedness is genetic — the red and green photopigment genes sit on the X chromosome, so a man has only one copy and a single altered gene shows up, while a woman usually has a working second copy. Blue-yellow deficiency is far rarer and affects both sexes about equally, and seeing no colour at all is rarer still, on the order of one person in tens of thousands.
Is anything recorded?
No. Your answers to the colour blind test stay in the browser and vanish when you leave the page. There is no account, no upload, and no tracking of results.
Is it free, and is any of it behind a sign-up?
Free, with no account and no email — the ten plates and the summary that follows are all on this page. Part of why that is possible: the plates are drawn by us rather than reproduced from a published set, so there is no licence sitting behind them that somebody has to be charged for.
When should I use this, and when should I see an eye clinic?
Use this when you want to check a suspicion, make sense of a pattern you have noticed in your family, or work out why a chart at work is hard for you to read. Go to a clinic when the answer has consequences — a job or a licence with a colour vision requirement — because a screen cannot stand in for standardised printed charts under controlled lighting. Children have a practical floor as well: this test uses digits, so it only means something once a child reads numbers confidently. Younger children are tested in a clinic with plates that carry shapes instead of digits, made for someone who knows shapes but does not read numbers yet. Finding it early matters because colour does the teaching in a classroom — maps, charts, work sorted into coloured trays — and that way a difficulty with colour is not mistaken for a difficulty with learning.