Nearly every barcode scanner I've run across is effectively a keyboard. I'd give it a try with one of the commonly available ones; worst case you can always return it.

It looked like the same form factor like my beloved MS Intellimouse (which is dying). Plus it has 5 buttons so I can macro some things to it in World of Warcraft. It is optical as well. Also it cost ...

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) was originally created to replace legacy parallel and serial ports on PCs, for example, mouse and keyboard connections, printer parallel cables, outboard modem serial ...