Can I access a Prox card from within a web page?

Question

I have an internal web based utility that we use to keep track of employee training. Currently, in order to indicate that training has been completed, the employee being trained has to input their employee number and a PIN. Then, the person conducting the training has to do the same. This utility runs on dedicated touch screen computers that run Chrome in kiosk mode.

Everybody in the company already carries a Prox Card. I also have a 5025CL reader. Getting the information about which employee carries which card is an issue I can handle. What I'm having an issue with is being able to access the smart card reader from the web page. I came across the Smart Card Connector from Google, but it appears to only work on ChromeOS.

For reasons that are probably pretty obvious in 2017, I'd like to avoid Java or Flash for interfacing with this hardware. I think my ideal would be an extension for Chrome that can recognize a special tag (probably a <div> with a specific id) and display instructions to scan that card. Once it detects a card scan, it submits the form. Obviously writing a little JavaScript to pull that together is no issue.

I am open to alternatives, but would also like to avoid going back to Internet Explorer. I originally ran IE on these computers, but due to some rendering issues switched them all to Chrome.

Answer 1

Sadly I was unable to solve this issue in my preferred way (with a plugin/extension to Chrome for interacting with a Smart Card reader). But I was able to get it working by using CefSharp in a VB.Net project. The VB.Net code is able to interact with the Smart Card reader (in my case HID 5025 CL) and pass those results to the web page being processed by CefSharp.

More detail (and some code) can be found as the answer to another question.