X2Access — XCOM 2 WOTC Accessibility Mod

Screen-reader accessibility for blind and visually impaired players of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. To our knowledge, the first native (injected C++) mod for this game.

X2Access is two cooperating layers:

• Native ASI plugin (src/) — injected via Ultimate ASI Loader. Owns speech output through Prism (screen readers / SAPI5), keyboard input via a window-procedure arbiter, a ProcessEvent hook that observes the game's script function dispatch, UI reading straight off the widget tree, and the engine-neutral navigation kernel.
• UnrealScript companion mod (mods/X2AccessCompanion/) — built with the official SDK against the X2WOTCCommunityHighlander. Owns game-state interpretation: combat narration on Highlander event hooks, and the words for every screen whose text goes into Flash and is retained nowhere.

The rule of thumb: if the information is on screen (widgets, lists, focus), the C++ side reads it; if it is about the game simulation (units, cover, HP, turns, objectives), UnrealScript reads it and pushes; input and speech are always native.

The two halves talk over the engine's own dispatch. Script to native: the companion writes a string property and fires an empty sentinel function (X2Access_Speak), which the native ProcessEvent hook catches, reads out via reflection, and speaks — there is no DLLBind in XCOM 2's engine build, so this is the only script-to-native path. Native to script: outbound ProcessEvent calls onto the companion's class default objects, whose answers are reflected straight back out.

The division of responsibility, engine facts, and development rules are documented in CLAUDE.md; per-screen reverse-engineering notes live in docs/.

What is covered

X2Access is under active development and does not yet cover the whole game. What works today:

Shell and menus — main menu, settings, the whole new-campaign flow (difficulty, Second Wave, Ironman, narrative content, soundtrack), save and load, the in-game pause menu, modal dialogs, and the text-entry box that names a save — the one surface where your own keystrokes are echoed back, because they go into a Flash text field no screen reader can see.

The Avenger — the room grid ("ant farm"), with the game's own eight-way room navigation turned on; inside a room; choosing what to build; clearing debris; the personnel roster, read as a proper table rather than a flattened list; and the thirteen-screen commodity family — choose research, build items, storage, implants, the black market, post-mission loot and the rest — item card included.

The geoscape — a category ring over regions, missions, scan sites, alien facilities, faction headquarters and continents, each with distance and bearing from a sort origin you choose.

Tactical combat — a tile cursor you walk around the map with (cover per edge, hazards, ledges, fog parity, reachability, and a two-press move-to that commits through the game's own click path); an object scanner ring over eleven categories (markers, enemies — the Lost included, as one swarm entry — your squad, loot, reinforcements, evac, civilians, hazards, interactables, towers, and ramps/ladders); the shot HUD with odds, damage band, target cover and health; free aim for grenades and other point-targeted abilities, which vanilla offers no keyboard path to at all; the hacking screen, likewise mouse-only in vanilla; a selected-soldier readout; and running narration of abilities, damage, deaths, turn handover and concealment.

Story and transitions — the tutorial's message surfaces, the Skyranger briefing on the way to and from a mission, the radio commlink that carries essentially all of XCOM 2's story dialogue, and the toast and notice stacks.

Several of these turn on keyboard navigation the game already has and simply never enables for mouse-and-keyboard players; a few others provide keyboard access the game never had at all.

Building

Prerequisites

• CMake 3.25+
• Visual Studio 2019+ with C++ desktop workload (MSVC x64)
• XCOM 2 War of the Chosen SDK (install from Steam)
• Git submodules initialized: git submodule update --init --recursive (this includes X2WOTCCommunityHighlander at deps/X2WOTCCommunityHighlander, pinned to v1.31.0-release — the same build as the workshop release the game loads; the companion mod compiles against its source)

Build Steps

cmake -B build -A x64
cmake --build build --config Release

Output: build/bin/Release/X2Access.asi

UnrealScript Companion Mod

The companion mod (X2AccessCompanion) is compiled using X2ModBuildCommon integrated into the CMake build:

# Compile UnrealScript mod only
cmake --build build --target build_uscript --config Release

# Build everything and deploy to game directory
cmake --build build --target deploy --config Release

Close the game before either of these. The running game holds the compiled package open, and the UnrealScript deploy step waits on that lock forever rather than failing — it looks like a slow compile and is not.

The SDK and game paths default to the development machine's Steam library (C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/). Override at configure time if your library lives elsewhere:

cmake -B build -A x64 \
  -DXCOM2_SDK_PATH="<SteamLibrary>/steamapps/common/XCOM 2 War of the Chosen SDK" \
  -DXCOM2_GAME_PATH="<SteamLibrary>/steamapps/common/XCOM 2/XCom2-WarOfTheChosen"

Tests

The navigation kernel is STL-only by contract and compiles standalone, so its conformance suite needs neither the game nor the SDK:

ctest --test-dir build -C Release

Development shortcuts

A justfile wraps the common loops — just build, just install, just deploy, just test, just run, just kill, just log. Dev builds also carry a loopback HTTP harness for observing and driving a live session (just arm, then just dev-status / dev-speech / dev-gui / dev-props). It is compiled out of release builds entirely and additionally needs a marker file to arm; see the dev-harness section of CLAUDE.md.

Installation

Automated (deploy target)

cmake --build build --target deploy --config Release

This copies X2Access.asi to the game's Binaries/Win64/scripts/ directory and deploys the companion mod to XComGame/Mods/. You still need to manually install the ASI loader (see below).

Manual

1. Download Ultimate ASI Loader x64 — get version-x64.zip
2. Extract version.dll to your XCOM 2 WOTC binary directory:

   <Steam>/steamapps/common/XCOM 2/XCom2-WarOfTheChosen/Binaries/Win64/
   

3. Create a scripts/ folder inside Win64/
4. Copy X2Access.asi into scripts/

That is the whole install. Prism is linked statically, so there is no speech DLL to place beside the game — including for NVDA: Prism generates the NVDA RPC client stubs itself and talks to the reader over RPC, so nvdaControllerClient.dll is neither needed nor looked for.

The X2WOTC Community Highlander is a required dependency of the companion mod, at compile time (the mod builds against its source, pinned as a submodule to the same release the workshop ships) and at runtime (subscribe to it on the Steam Workshop and enable it alongside X2AccessCompanion).

File Layout

XCom2-WarOfTheChosen/Binaries/Win64/
  version.dll                  ← Ultimate ASI Loader
  scripts/
    X2Access.asi               ← This mod (Prism statically linked)

Usage

Launch XCOM 2 WOTC normally. You should hear "X2 Access loaded" via your active screen reader or Windows SAPI5.

Hotkeys

Keys are claimed through the input arbiter, per (key, modifier) chord and per context: while the mod handles a chord, the game does not see it. Every key below is live only in the context it is listed under — the tile cursor's arrows stand down the moment the shot HUD goes up, and so on.

Everywhere

Key	Action
Shift+/ (?)	Read navigation help

Menus and screens — while a screen the mod reads is open

Key	Action
Arrow keys	Move between items; Left/Right also adjust sliders, spinners and dropdowns
Tab / Shift+Tab	Next / previous group of controls on the screen
Enter, Space	Activate the focused item
Home / End	First / last item
PageUp / PageDn	Previous / next tab (settings)

Tactical — moving around the map

Key	Action
Arrow keys	Step the tile cursor one tile (world-absolute: Up is always north)
Ctrl+, / Ctrl+.	Cursor down / up one floor
C	Recenter the cursor on the selected soldier
Delete	Re-announce the current tile
Backspace ×2	Move the selected soldier to the cursor tile
;	Read the selected soldier in full

Tactical — the object scanner

Key	Action
B / Shift+B	Next / previous objective marker
. / Shift+.	Next / previous enemy
, / Shift+,	Next / previous squad member
PageDn / PageUp	Next / previous entry in the current category
Ctrl+PageDn / Ctrl+PageUp	Next / previous non-empty category
O	Re-announce the last entry
/	Put the tile cursor on it
Shift+Tab	Previous soldier (re-provided; see below)

Tactical — aiming a shot — while the shot HUD is up

Key	Action
Delete	Re-announce the shot
H	Read the hit-chance breakdown

Tactical — free aim — grenades, cones, lines, evac placement

Key	Action
Arrow keys	Move the aim point
Ctrl+, / Ctrl+.	Aim point down / up one floor
Delete	Re-announce the aim point
/	Aim at the scanner's selection

Hacking screen

Key	Action
Left / Right	Choose a reward card
Delete	Re-announce

The Avenger and the Skyranger

Key	Action
Delete	Re-announce the focused room / the briefing

Geoscape

Key	Action
PageDn / PageUp	Next / previous entry in the category
Ctrl+PageDn / Ctrl+PageUp	Next / previous non-empty category
O	Re-announce the selection
Home	Measure distances from the selection
C	Measure distances from the Avenger
/	Point the camera at the selection

Tutorial

Key	Action
I	Re-read the tutorial message

About the keys we take. X2Access never edits your key bindings, and it never needs to. The engine matches a binding leniently — a bare key fires whatever modifiers you happen to be holding — so every vanilla action on a key we claim stays reachable at Ctrl+key: the arbiter swallows the bare key, the Ctrl chord passes through untouched, and the game matches its own binding with Ctrl held. Bare Left drives the tile cursor; Ctrl+Left still scrolls the camera. Tab stays yours in both of its meanings — switching soldiers is narrated by watching the game rather than by taking the key, which also catches the mouse click, the turn start and the re-select after a soldier goes down. The one debt is Shift+Tab, which the scanner claims and re-provides, because holding Shift for a reverse cycle would otherwise trip the game's own prev-soldier binding.

Logging

Check scripts/X2Access.log for initialization details and diagnostics. The previous three sessions rotate to X2Access.1/2/3.log, so relaunching does not destroy the evidence for whatever you were chasing.

Third-party licenses

Prism is Mozilla Public License 2.0 and is statically linked into X2Access.asi. MPL-2.0 permits that combination and leaves this project's own sources untouched, but it is file-level copyleft: the source for Prism, including any change we make to its files, must stay available to anyone who receives the binary. We vendor it unmodified as the deps/prism submodule pinned to a published tag (v0.17.3), so the upstream repository is that source. Prism in turn bundles its own third-party code — see its NOTICE file.

XCOM 2 is a trademark of Take-Two Interactive. This is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Firaxis Games or 2K.