This is a shot in the dark, but we have been using small Ignition Vision apps to interface with lab bench style equipment. Generally it is formatting the data or walking the operator through the process then finally submitting the data to some other system, DB, MES, etc.
Obviously vision serial module works great for this, but how about the browser?
I came across this https://developer.chrome.com/apps/serial and it looks like its been supported for awhile, but maybe only in Chrome?
WebUSB also sounds promising, but early… https://wicg.github.io/webusb/
So… serial support in perspective?