How to represent tally/five-bar-gate in unicode?

Question

Are there Unicode characters to represent bundles (and partial bundles) of 5 in the style of the tally/five-bar-gate?

If not, what would be the most standard/semantic/accessible solution to this problem?

Things I've tried but don't like:

• Using the numbers 1-5 - easily confusing (3 bundles of 5 looks like 555)
• 1-4 pipes with strike-through for '5' - semantically messy, strike-through not reliably portable
• Ogham letter Straif for '5' - non-contiguous/not-associated with representations of 1-4 (all Ogham characters contain the horizontal line)
• Images with a descriptive alt tag - only works for the web, verbose for text-only browsers/screen readers.

References:

• Wikipedia's page on tally notation shows nice Asian and Latin American systems. My audience is mostly European, but a method in these styles would be acceptable if the five-bar-gate is not possible.

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

The closest thing Unicode has to tally marks are the counting rod numerals.

 U+1D360 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT ONE
 U+1D361 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT TWO
 U+1D362 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT THREE
 U+1D363 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT FOUR
 U+1D364 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT FIVE
 U+1D365 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT SIX
 U+1D366 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT SEVEN
 U+1D367 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT EIGHT
 U+1D368 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT NINE
 U+1D369 COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT ONE
 U+1D36A COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT TWO
 U+1D36B COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT THREE
 U+1D36C COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT FOUR
 U+1D36D COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT FIVE
 U+1D36E COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT SIX
 U+1D36F COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT SEVEN
 U+1D370 COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT EIGHT
 U+1D371 COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT NINE

As far as I can tell, there is no |||| character.