i think this is great as a proof of concept. i wonder what this would look like implemented as a color gradient that transitions to pure white by 70% of the width of the box (or maybe hsla that drops the alpha to 0 by 70% the width of the box)? or maybe more simply as a colored left border (or maybe left and bottom border)? maybe a gradient with variable points at which it transitioned to white (effectively creating something like a bar chart) could solve the color blindness problem?
then the main unresolved problem would be the problem of the situation where the real answer isn’t actually in the list. hopefully those kinds of situations would more often look more like your bottom example with lots of red than your top example above with bright green choices…
i think 0-120 hues on hsl is a good choice for color scales. on a scale of 0 to 1 then, 0 would be red, 0.25 would be orange, 0.5 would be yellow, 0.75 would be yellow-green, and 1 would be green. (i’m a little surprised to see so much red in the examples above, but maybe i shouldn’t be. this is exactly the kind of truth i was hoping could be revealed by something like this though.)