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/.

Status

Pre-alpha. Under active development and not ready for general use: coverage grows screen by screen, keys can change without notice, and screens that already work may break as neighbouring ones land. Expect rough edges, and back up your saves.

Test builds are published as a rolling dev release — the tag always points at the newest build, so the same download link gives you the current one. Bug reports should name the commit the release notes quote, since the tag alone never will.

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, height changes, 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.

Requirements

• XCOM 2: War of the Chosen on PC (Windows), the current build. The base game without the expansion is not supported: the companion is a WOTC mod and the native side is measured against the WOTC executable. Steam and GOG are both supported — they ship different executables, so the mod carries a set of addresses for each and says which one it recognised in the first lines of its log. An executable it does not recognise is named there too, which is the one thing a report about a silent mod has to contain.
• Ultimate ASI Loader — the version-x64.zip build. This is what loads the mod into the game; without it nothing speaks, and nothing in the game changes at all.
• The X2WOTC Community Highlander from the Steam Workshop, subscribed and enabled. The companion mod is compiled against it and does not load without it. The native side runs either way, so with the Highlander missing the menus still read but combat narration and every screen whose words come from the companion go quiet — it looks like a partial mod, not a broken one. On a copy of the game that did not come from Steam, its GitHub releases are the same mod: unzip it into XComGame\Mods\ so its .XComMod file sits one folder down, which is exactly as deep as the game looks.
• If you own the Alien Hunters DLC (the Alien Rulers), the Highlander's Alien Hunters plugin as well — that DLC ships a script package built against the unmodified game, which the Highlander replaces, and the plugin is the rebuilt one. Without the DLC the plugin has to stay off; its authors warn it breaks a game that has no Alien Hunters. The install check works out which of the two cases you are in.
• A screen reader (NVDA, JAWS, ZDSR, ZoomText, SenseReader, PC-Talker, BoyPCReader), or SAPI / Windows OneCore as the fallback. 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, so nvdaControllerClient.dll is neither needed nor looked for.

Installing

Download the archive from the dev release and extract it at the War of the Chosen game folder — XCom2-WarOfTheChosen, the one holding Binaries/ and XComGame/ (on Steam, under steamapps/common/XCOM 2). It contains:

README.md
LICENSE
LICENSE-MinHook.txt                        (the hooking library's notice)
X2Access-Check.cmd, X2Access-Check.ps1     (the install check: run it after extracting)
Binaries/Win64/scripts/X2Access.asi        (the native plugin, Prism and MinHook statically linked)
Binaries/Win64/scripts/X2Access.pdb        (symbols, so a crash dump can be read)
XComGame/Mods/X2AccessCompanion/           (the companion mod: .XComMod, Config, Localization, Script)

Binaries/Win64/scripts/ is where the ASI loader looks for plugins, and XComGame/Mods/ is where the game's launcher looks for local mods; neither is a choice. Both halves must land — the ASI reads screens, the companion supplies the words for combat and for every screen whose text the game keeps only in Flash, and one without the other is a mod that goes quiet in places, not a mod that fails.

Then:

1. Put the ASI loader's version.dll in Binaries/Win64/, next to XCom2.exe. The loader can impersonate several system DLL names; version.dll is the one its x64 package ships as, and any of the others works too.
2. With the game closed, run X2Access-Check.cmd from the game folder. It checks that the loader, the ASI, the companion and the Highlander are all in place — subscribed or hand-installed, either counts — names anything missing and how to fix it, and enables X2AccessCompanion, the Community Highlander and, if you have the Alien Hunters DLC, its Alien Hunters plugin in the game's mod settings the way the launcher does (XComModOptions.ini, under Documents\My Games\XCOM2 War of the Chosen\XComGame\Config). Its output is plain text, one finding per line, each starting with OK, FIXED, PROBLEM or NOTE. If you launch through the Alternative Mod Launcher, tick those mods there as well: it rewrites that list from its own selection on every launch. The script lives at tools/dist/ in this repository.
3. Launch through your store or the mod launcher as usual. If you start XCom2.exe directly instead, add -review to its arguments: the launchers pass it for you, and without it the game boots its developer shell instead of the retail main menu, where nothing reads.

Usage

You should hear "X2 Access loaded" through your screen reader or SAPI as the game comes up.

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)

Inside Avenger rooms, Tab reaches Room shortcuts whenever the game shows that bar. Use Left/Right to choose a destination, Enter to open it, and Space to hear its tooltip. The bar reports the game's number shortcuts and disabled rooms. On the first tutorial visit to Commander's Quarters, choose Research (or press 2); the game blocks Escape at that stage.

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
Alt	Targets from the cursor tile — the game's target preview, spoken (the game keeps the key too)
;	Read the selected soldier in full
E / Q	Next / previous soldier (the game's own switch, moved here from Tab / Shift; also next / previous target while aiming)
Ctrl+Q / Ctrl+E	Rotate the tactical camera left / right

Every step also says who would see a soldier on that tile ("Seen by 2") and whether its cover holds against them ("flanked"), the way the game draws the eye markers and the red cover shield on every hover. With the game's own "Show Target Preview" option on, the Alt readout rides every step as well.

Tactical — the HUD layer — Tab moves the arrows from the map onto the HUD's panels

Key	Action
Tab	Enter the HUD layer (from the map)
Tab / Shift+Tab	Next / previous panel: Soldier, Abilities, Commands, Targets, Objectives
Arrow keys	Walk a panel (Left/Right along the ability bar, the command strip and the target strip)
Enter	Use the ability, press the command, or aim at the target
Escape	Back to the map

The Targets panel is the row of enemy heads: best shot first, each with its hit chance, cover or flanked, health, squadsight, whether the selected ability can reach it, its buffs and debuffs, and how far away it is.

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

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
Tab	Enter the Avenger HUD layer (Escape leaves)
Delete	Re-announce the focused room / the briefing
E / Q	Next / previous soldier on the Armory, Customize and Bond screens (the game's own cycle, moved here from Tab / Shift)

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. 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.

The one binding change we ship. The companion mod carries an XComInput.ini that moves the game's own next unit and previous unit commands from Tab and Left Shift onto E and Q, in tactical and on the Avenger alike. Tactical camera rotation moves to Ctrl+Q / Ctrl+E, and the game's camera hints follow. Everything the game did on Tab it now does on E — next soldier, next target while aiming, next soldier in the Armory — and its own key hints say so. Switching 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. Because Left Shift no longer carries a binding, Shift is a plain modifier for every reverse-cycle chord above, and bare Tab is free to be the HUD layer's key. The game's Controls screen shows the new bindings and will save them into your profile if you press Save there; they then persist even without the mod, and the Controls screen is where to put them back.

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.

Building from source

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 the workshop copy's source)
• The generated SDK under generated_sdk/, which is not in git: it is dumped from the live game, and docs/build.md has the four-step recipe.

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 deploy target copies X2Access.asi to the game's Binaries/Win64/scripts/ and the companion to XComGame/Mods/; the ASI loader is still installed by hand, as above.

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 docs/dev-harness.md.

Cutting a test release

just release builds both halves from a clean checkout of HEAD with the dev harness compiled out, proves that on the binary, and publishes the rolling dev release; just release-dry stops before the upload. just hooks installs the pre-push hook that does this on every push of main. Details and the credentials it needs are in docs/build.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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 under MIT, 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.

MinHook (Copyright (C) 2009-2017 Tsuda Kageyu, with the Hacker Disassembler Engine, Copyright (c) 2008-2009 Vyacheslav Patkov) is BSD-2-Clause and is statically linked into X2Access.asi, pinned to v1.3.4 as the deps/minhook submodule. Its full notice ships beside this file as LICENSE-MinHook.txt.

The companion mod is built with X2ModBuildCommon (MIT) against the X2WOTC Community Highlander (MIT); neither is bundled in the archive.

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.