Print-and-Play and Digital Games for a Playful Assessment of Colour Vision Deficiencies

The paper presents ColorFit, a two-player tile-placement and colour-matching board game designed as a playful, low-pressure tool for the early identification of colour vision deficiencies (CVD) in children. Its central argument is that CVD often goes undetected in Italy until primary school, when colour-coded learning creates classroom and self-esteem difficulties, and that conventional tests like the Ishihara plates are clinical, intimidating for young children, and poorly suited to schools. The authors position ColorFit as a screening aid that observes move choices and response times to flag possible colour perception problems, explicitly stating that it supports early detection rather than full diagnosis.

The game is offered in print-and-play form, with multiple colour palettes ("spring," "autumn," "winter"), a solitaire snake-path variant for younger or special-needs children, and a digital version that enforces rules, allows customisation, and records latency and error patterns. A pilot involved 1,009 students (558 boys, 516 girls) across 52 classes, mostly primary schools, in northern Italy, with observers using coded grids and video recordings for retrospective analysis. Thirty-six students (3.6%) were identified as potentially colour blind, a rate the authors note is below the national estimate of about 8.5% for males, though the paper does not formally validate detection accuracy against clinical testing.

The pilot also surfaced practical findings: rule ambiguities around the "X" and "O" symbols, confusion between tiles and playing cards, competitive dynamics that distorted colour decisions, and compensatory behaviours in children who struggled. The paper's future work covers accessibility evaluation of commercial board games and teacher training resources under the Game4CED project.