A lot of people have taken the new AREALME color blindness test since it went live. Some of them say certain questions are harder than the color blindness tests they usually take. That difficulty is intentional.

The test challenges the limit of color discrimination. It includes easier items and harder challenges. It is not only a screening clone of a standard clinical plate test.

Why the hard plates are there

The New Color Blindness Test Scores Red, Green, and Blue Separately describes how a plate works. You look for a figure in a field of dots, often a ring with a gap, and the result is three scores, for the cones that prefer red, green, and blue. The difficulty does not stay at one level.

The first plates are practice, and a few later plates are bright enough that the figure is obvious. The harder plates use a smaller color difference. The test keeps making that difference smaller until it finds the point where the figure drops out. People with typical color vision miss plates too. Missing one is part of measuring a limit.

A usual color blindness test is a fixed set of plates at a screening difficulty. This one still screens, and it also asks how small a color difference you can still see. A plate that looks extremely subtle is near that edge on purpose. It is not a blank, and it is not an arbitrary pattern with no figure in it.

This remains a screening test. It does not diagnose. A hard plate is a step in finding that limit, not a medical result by itself.

What the saturation edit shows

gghhh, a user on Threads, recorded plates that look extremely subtle at normal saturation. In the iPhone Photos editor, raising saturation makes the true answer visible. The video is on the AREALME YouTube channel.

Watch the saturation edit on YouTube.

The edit is a demonstration of what is printed on the plate. The colors are already there. At normal saturation they sit so close together that the figure can look almost absent. More saturation separates those colors, so the shape that was drawn becomes easy to see.

Watch it if a hard plate felt blank or arbitrary. The figure is real. The hard plates sit near the edge of normal discrimination.

The clip does not prove a diagnosis. The test is meant to be answered the way each plate is shown, at normal color. Raising saturation on a recording shows the print. The result still comes from what you can see on the screen in front of you.

Try the test

The color blindness test takes a few minutes. Expect practice, then easier items and harder challenges, then a pattern and three channel scores. If a plate is hard to see, that can be the point of the plate.