Is it possible to animate which characters of a text object are assigned to a material? Is it possible to animate which materials are assigned to specific characters in a text object? It is quite easy to assign the materials how I want using this method, but I do not know of a way to animate it. Is this possible at this point? And if not, is there a workaround using different techniques that I could use?

This question is similar to this question and this question, I just want to know if there are other methods that could be used for text objects.
Blender 2.76: This appears to currently be an unavailable feature.

Some workarounds could be to assign a different material to each letter and animate the colors of the individual materials, but there is no built in way to do this.