differentiate text color?

Here's the problem: region.text() is not working for me. This is a known problem with the OCR engine, I know. It's probably due to the small font size that I have to deal with, the text color and the noisy background. Whatever the reason, text() either gives nothing at all or semi-random characters, and it's not at all consistent.

However, I can do something based on the color of the text (white, yellow, red). But how do I get sikuli to recognize/know the color of the text? I can't use exact matches (even if that worked) because the text changes.

I thought of two ways to do this but don't know how to implement them.

One is to scan the entire region for a particular color. Except how do I capture the font color in question? What if it's not a single, simple color but has shading? Also, there would have to be some kind of threshold count so that random background pixels would't give a false positive. I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this problem, so are there any scripts out there that do this?

The other thing is to get a snapshot of each character (it's a number, so only 10 characters) and try to do matches on each digit, in each position, for each color. For a 5 digit number that's 5 * 10 * 3 = 1500 matches. Doesn't sound feasible. Plus all the coding to handle shorter numbers. Unless there's a trick I'm missing?

Any suggestions on how to handle this?