MSAccess/VisualBasic has barcode scanning readily available?

There are barcode scanners that can emulate keyboard input. As I recall, the app reading the barcodes has to recognize a hot-key pattern that precedes the virtual keystrokes representing the barcode date (and maybe a second hot-key that follows). This was several years ago. While easy to work with, they were significantly more expensive than the ones that just sent bytes of binary data.