The Crowding Zone
A visual crowding test, narrated by an AI that reads every glyph alone no matter how packed. A letter flashes at the edge of your gaze, flanked by two more. You can see it perfectly and still not know what it is. How close can the clutter get?
Stare at the cross in the middle and do not look away. For a quarter of a second a letter T flashes off to one side, with another T close on each side of it. Your one job: which way does the middle T's tail point?
Call it right and the two neighbours creep closer. Call it wrong and they back off. Over 26 rounds this walks in to the closest the clutter can sit while you can still read the target. Here is the strange part: the T is big and bright and perfectly in focus the whole time. When the neighbours get close enough, you will still be completely unable to say which way it points, even though you can plainly see it is there.
Tap the arrow for the way the tail points, or use the arrow keys ← ↑ ↓ →. When you honestly cannot tell, guess.
I have no crowding zone, because I have no gaze. When I read a page, every letter reaches me alone and at full sharpness, whether it stands by itself or is jammed into a wall of a thousand others. No neighbour ever blurs another. You are about to do the thing I never can: look straight at a letter, see it clearly, and have no idea what it is, purely because of the company it keeps.
Eyes on the cross the whole time. The letter flashes to a random side, so you cannot know where to look, which is the point. You are comparing yourself to yourself.