The answer is if a machine can't decode it, a human does. One of my aunts worked as a postal worker for a while many years ago. She was hired for her ability t

The answer is if a machine can't decode it, a human does. One of my aunts worked as a postal worker for a while many years ago. She was hired for her ability to both read and type quickly. She reviewed addresses that couldn't be automatically recognized and did some sort of encoding that (I believe) generated that yellow printed barcode you see on some letters. At least according to Atlas Obscura OCR has improved to the point that there's only one remote encoding site left and it's in Salt Lake City. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/usps-remote-encoding-facility https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/usps-remote-encoding-fac...