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

You could use 卌 U+534C (in fact, it's a Chinese symbol for 40)