Eye Charts in Various Languages
I had to go to the eye doctor recently, and to no one’s surprise, my prescription had changed again. After getting the eye drops and running the gauntlet of all the machines and gadgets the ophthalmologist uses, I eventually came to the part of the exam where I got to squint and see if I could read off of the good old-fashioned eye chart.
Of course, my brain went onto several tangents of what other types of charts are out there besides English or the Latin alphabet, and so down the rabbit hole I went.
The following postcard (4 inch x 6 inch) images are for entertainment or decorative purposes only. They are not to be used for medical advise nor for prescriptive presumptions. Please use common sense. Having said that, enjoy the following charts:
ENGLISH
This is the most common chart that you encounter in the United States, known as the Snellen Chart.
ARABIC (MODERN STANDARD)
Based on an average letter frequency chart by Gheith A. Abandah and Mohammed Zeki Khedher from a collected 2009 corpus.
FRAKTUR
Based on the letter forms and patterns from George Mayerle’s International Eye Test Chart (ca. 1907).
GREEK (MODERN)
Based on a letter frequency chart by Stefan Trost.
HEBREW
Based on the letter forms and patterns from George Mayerle’s International Eye Test Chart (ca. 1907).
HINDI
Based on a character frequency chart by Stefan Trost.
NUKTITUT – CREE – OJIBWE (Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics)
The first visual acuity charts using Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (CAS) for Inuktitut, Cree, and Ojibwe speakers were created in 2023 by Dr. Christian El-Hadad, an ophthalmologist at McGill University, and Shaan Bhambra
JAPANESE (Hiragana)
Based on a Character Frequency Chart by Xah Lee, from a collected 2017 word corpus.
JAPANESE (Katakana)
Based on the characters and patterns from George Mayerle’s International Eye Test Chart (ca. 1907).
JAPANESE (Kanji)
Chart based on Character Frequency Chart by Dmitry Shpika, from a collected Japanese Wikinews word corpus.
KOREAN
Chart based on Character Frequency Chart by the National Institute of the Korean Language Corpus.
MANDARIN CHINESE
Based on the characters and patterns from George Mayerle’s International Eye Test Chart (ca. 1907).
RUNIC
Based on an eye chart created by Cascadilla Press.
RUSSIAN
Based on the letter forms and patterns from George Mayerle’s International Eye Test Chart (ca. 1907).
This image shows a Golovin–Sivtsev table, which is a standardized eye chart traditionally used to measure visual acuity in Russia and several other post-Soviet states. The chart features specific Cyrillic letters as optotypes (specifically Ш, Б, М, Н, К, Ы, and И) formatted similarly to a Western Snellen chart.
LANDOLT-C
The Landolt C, also known as a Landolt ring, Landolt broken ring, or Japanese vision test, is an optotype—a standardized symbol used for testing vision. It was developed by the Swiss-born ophthalmologist Edmund Landolt.
TUMBLING E
This is a Tumbling E eye chart, a standard vision test used to measure visual acuity, especially for children, individuals who do not know the English alphabet, or non-verbal patients.Instead of reading different letters, the person being tested simply identifies the direction the “fingers” of the letter E are pointing: up, down, left, or right.
