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

user_201665 0
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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!

accessibility numbers semantics unicode character-encoding
5 Answers

A proposal to include “Western-style tally marks” (L2/16-065, PDF) was accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee in May 2016.

This introduces two characters:

  • u1D377 - TALLY MARK ONE -
  • u1D378 - TALLY MARK FIVE -

As of early 2018, these characters are “accepted by UTC and in active ISO technical ballot (or on hold for ballot)”. Their adoption progress can be monitored in the proposed characters pipeline.

user_2016650
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