Color deficiency screening
Ten minutes to find what everyone assumed was fine.
A 27 plate screening, taken in a clinic or at home, scored automatically and returned to whoever referred the person. It finds children the classroom is quietly failing, and conditions in older adults that nobody was looking for.
In children
Roughly 1 in 12 boys and 1 in 200 girls has a color vision deficiency. Color is one of the first vocabularies a child learns and a channel the classroom leans on constantly, yet color screening is required in only eleven states, and most five and six year olds have never had an eye exam.
- Can be completed at home with a parent
- Results email automatically to the school nurse
- Raises accurate referral rates by more than 50%
In older adults
Losing color discrimination means missing the things color is the warning for: pressure sores, rashes, jaundice, cyanosis, blood or bile in the urine. It also surfaces conditions nobody had diagnosed yet.
- Glaucoma, diabetes, macular degeneration, cataracts
- Fewer medication misidentifications
- Supports CMS outcome measures under the IMPACT Act
A hearing screening is also available inside the platform for providers who want it. It is a smaller part of what we do. Ask about it once the vision program is running.
The cost of not testing
Losing color is how an older adult stops seeing edges.
Color and contrast discrimination fade slowly, and almost nobody reports it, because nothing ever looks wrong. The world simply gets flatter. What disappears first is the boundary between one surface and the next, and boundaries are what keep people upright.
Where the edge goes missing
- The lip of a step against a floor of the same tone
- The line where carpet meets tile or hardwood
- A white grab bar mounted on a white wall
- The rim of a bath or the edge of a shower tray
- A threshold strip between two rooms
- A curb, a ramp, or a stair nosing in low evening light
Why it is missed
Acuity testing does not catch it. A patient can read the chart, so nothing triggers a referral, and the loss gets recorded as unsteadiness, caution, or simply age. Staff describe the person as being careful on stairs. Families describe them as slowing down. Nobody writes down that the stairs stopped having edges.
Screening is the only thing that names it, and it takes under ten minutes.
What an untested patient costs, in order
Every step in that chain is expensive, and the people carrying the cost are the patient, the family, and the provider whose fall and readmission numbers absorb it. The screening that could have started the conversation is the cheapest thing in the building.
Designed for the thing it screens for
Nothing here depends on telling one color from another.
A site about color vision has an obligation not to fail its own test, so meaning never rests on hue alone. Screeners and receivers are marked by shape as well as color, a solid square against a circle, and every status carries a word next to it. We checked the whole palette against simulated protanopia and deuteranopia rather than assuming it was fine, and the lowest text contrast anywhere on the site is 5.9 to 1, comfortably past the WCAG AA threshold of 4.5.