Ok! This makes life much more easy...now...
First of all, you can't have accents in the css...nor spaces...you will need to clean the databefore it can be used. Now, I have no idea what your code looks like so I'm just going to quickly show you how you could do this.
For instance, where you are inputting your id you could do something like this instead...
id='" . strtolower( str_replace(array('é','á'), array('e','a'), $input['sec_desc']) ) . "'
I hope that makes sense what I'm doing there. I'm doing a string replace to remove accents with the non-accented equivalents and then making everything lower case.
Next, how you could use this in your CSS would be something like this...
ul#categories { }
ul#categories li.section_title { color: ... }
ul#categories li a { color: ... }
Make a new set of CSS rules for each section and then you can control the color of things all you want. Hope this does the trick for you...let us know how this works out.
;)