The Freiburg Visual Acuity Test (FrACT) has been suggested as a promising test for quantifying the visual acuity (VA) of patients with very low vision, a condition often classified using the semi-quantitative clinical scale “counting fingers” (CF), “hand motion” (HM), “light perception” (LP) and “no light perception”. The present study was designed to assess FrACT performance in a sizable number of CF, HM, and LP patients in order to generate a setting for future clinical studies in the low vision range.

We examined a total of 41 patients (LP, n = 11; CF, n = 15; HM, n = 15) with various eye diseases (e.g., diabetic retinopathy, ARMD), covering the clinical VA scale from LP to CF. The FrACT optotypes were presented at a distance of 50 cm on a 17-inch LCD monitor with four random orientations. After training, two FrACT measurements (test and retest) were taken, each comprising 30 trials.

FrACT measures reproducibly the VA of CF and HM patients. In CF patients, FrACT resulted in a mean logMAR = 1.98 ± 0.24 (corresponding to a decimal VA of 0.010), for HM in a mean logMAR = 2.28 ± 0.15 (corresponding to a decimal VA of 0.0052). In all LP patients the FrACT values were close to what would be obtained by random guessing. The mean test–retest 95% confidence interval was 0.21 logMAR for CF patients and 0.31 logMAR for HM respectively. Test-retest variability declined from 24 to 30 trials, showing that at least 30 trials are necessary.

FrACT can reproducibly quantify VA in the CF and HM range. We observed a floor effect for LP, and it was not quantifiable further. Quantitative VA measures are thus obtainable in the very low-vision range using FrACT.