PalworldAccessibility

A UE4SS C++ mod that makes Palworld playable for blind / low-vision players. Routes in-game text to NVDA (and other screen readers, with SAPI fallback) via Tolk, and layers on accessibility-specific features: stat hotkeys, point-of-interest navigation with audio beacon, target lock, and screen-reader-friendly handling of Palworld's native menus.

Status: alpha 3 (v0.3.0-alpha.3). New speech rules (cued vs interrupting), F6 nav menu category filter (Fast travel / Dungeons / Landmarks / Buildings), patch notes auto-reader, and a pile of menu cleanups. Drag-and-drop install via the zip on the latest release

• SETUP.md. Day-to-day play is reachable through the screen reader. Expect rough edges on game UIs that haven't been mapped yet — bug reports / log snippets very welcome.

Features

Screen-reader output

• Tolk + NVDA / JAWS / Window-Eyes / SAPI fallback. Auto-detects the active reader; falls back to SAPI so the mod still speaks without a dedicated screen reader running.
• Speak / Announce / FocusUpdate / Queue layers with deduplication tuned per use-case (anti-chatter for repeated text, snappy for focus changes, sequential queue for material-cost lists).

Native menu accessibility

• Title menu — every menu button (Start Game, Multiplayer, Settings, Credits, Exit, …) reads its real label via designer-given instance names.
• Settings menu — Graphics / Audio / Game / Controls / Key bindings / Other categories announce on selection. Inside each, every option row reads its label + current value (e.g. "Mouse Sensitivity, 1", "VSync, off") using UE reflection on the row's BP_PalTextBlock_Name and the per-row Switch / Slider / LR-cycler state.
• World settings (single-player + multiplayer create world) — same treatment as the in-game settings rows. Stray "caution" placeholder text filtered out.
• In-game pause menu tabs (Construction / Inventory / Map / Tech / Pal).
• Construction menu — categories (Production / Foundation / …) announce on tab change. Item focus reads the build object's name and description from WBP_IngameMenu_Construction_Info_C (with rich-text <mapObjectName> markup stripped). Material costs queue separately as "3 of 10 Wood" per row.
• Inventory tabs + item slot buttons read their semantic instance names.
• Dialog / pop-up windows read their main text.
• System notifications (level-up, quest add, achievement, autosave, tutorial, …) read when their text is set, with placeholder filtering and 1-second dedupe so designer-time template strings (（仮）, あいうえお, Lorem ipsum) don't leak through.

Stat hotkeys (anywhere in-game)

• F1 — HP
• F2 — Hunger (current / max from SaveParameter.FullStomach)
• F3 — Stamina (SP / MP)
• F4 — Level
• F11 — Controller-connection sanity check (XInput)
• F12 — Diagnose: dumps the cached player pawn + state + nested stat-component properties to UE4SS.log so unknown fields can be wired

Reader unwraps Palworld's struct-wrapped FFixedPoint64 stats (divides by the 1000 scale) and reads Byte / Int16 / UInt16 properties — so Level reads as 1, not the underlying byte.

Point-of-interest navigation

• F5 — speak the 5 closest POIs with distance
• F6 — open the nav menu; ↑/↓ or D-pad up/down to cycle, Enter or Gamepad A to confirm, Esc or Gamepad B to close
• F9 — cancel an armed tracking target

Once a target is armed, an audio beacon (navbeakon.wav at the game root) pings continuously, panned and pitched in 3D:

• Stereo pan based on the player camera yaw vs. target bearing — hard left at 90° left, hard right at 90° right, behind drops to ~55% volume
• Pitch rises ~1 octave per 24 m the target is above you (and drops for below) — climbing a tower gets a higher beacon
• Ping rate shrinks with distance (≈150 ms at 0 m, ~800 ms at 50 m, ~2000 ms at 200 m+)
• TTS announces the direction phrase ("to your right", "behind you") only when it changes — the pan handles the continuous "where" feedback
• Arrival at 2 m (3D distance) auto-clears the target

POI classifier recognises dungeons, fast travel statues, syndicate towers, arenas, fishing spots, trees / resources, respawn points.

Target lock (gamepad-first, with keyboard mirror)

• Hold LB (gamepad Left Shoulder) or Tab to scan within 50 m for nearby entities, announce nearest target
• D-pad up/down or ↑/↓ cycle items within the current category
• D-pad left/right or ←/→ cycle categories (Enemies → Pals → Trees → Resources → Fishing → POIs, empty categories skipped)
• Release LB / Tab arms the selection; phase-3 audio beacon guidance takes over so you can face / approach it
• Target lock is suppressed while a native Palworld menu is open
• All hotkey/controller input is gated to Palworld's foreground window — no alt-tab spam

Layout

PalworldAccessibility/
├── src/                       # C++ mod source
│   ├── dllmain.cpp           # CppUserModBase entry point
│   ├── TolkBridge.{hpp,cpp}  # LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress wrapper for Tolk
│   ├── Speech.{hpp,cpp}      # Speak / Announce / FocusUpdate / Queue
│   ├── Hooks.{hpp,cpp}       # UE4SS hook dispatch — every menu handler lives here
│   ├── Hotkeys.{hpp,cpp}     # F-key + XInput polling, stat reading
│   └── Nav.{hpp,cpp}         # POI scan, target lock, audio beacon (XAudio2)
├── third_party/tolk/         # Prebuilt Tolk.dll + NVDA/SAAPI client DLLs
├── third_party/RE-UE4SS/     # Cloned by scripts/fetch-ue4ss.bat (gitignored)
├── Mods/PalAccessibility/    # enabled.txt + Scripts/main.lua marker
├── scripts/
│   ├── fetch-ue4ss.bat       # Clone RE-UE4SS
│   └── install-runtime.bat   # Copy Tolk + mod skeleton into the game dir
├── CMakeLists.txt
├── SETUP.md                  # End-user install guide (screen-reader friendly)
├── BUILD.md                  # Build-from-source walkthrough
└── ARCHITECTURE.md           # How the pieces fit together

Installing as a player

If you just want to use the mod and not compile it yourself, follow SETUP.md. It walks through installing UE4SS, copying the mod files into the game folder, and enabling it — no compiler or git required.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/<you>/PalworldAccessibility
cd PalworldAccessibility
scripts\fetch-ue4ss.bat
scripts\install-runtime.bat "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Palworld"
cmake -B build -G "Visual Studio 18 2026" -A x64 ^
      -DPALWORLD_DIR="C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Palworld"
cmake --build build --config Game__Shipping__Win64 --target PalAccess

You also need:

1. UE4SS v3.0.1 dropped into Pal\Binaries\Win64\ of your Palworld install.
2. NVDA (or your screen reader) running, OR SAPI configured.
3. navbeakon.wav placed at the game root next to Pal-Windows.pak's parent (i.e. the same directory as Palworld-Win64-Shipping.exe's great-grandparent — the actual Palworld folder). Optional but the nav audio beacon won't fire without it.
4. Epic Games linked to your GitHub to clone the Re-UE4SS/UEPseudo submodule (UE4SS source requires Epic's gated UE headers — see BUILD.md §3a).

See BUILD.md for the full walkthrough.

Default key bindings

Key	Action
F1	Speak current HP
F2	Speak current Hunger (cur / max)
F3	Speak current Stamina (cur / max)
F4	Speak current Level
F5	List 5 nearest POIs with distance
F6	Toggle nav menu
F9	Cancel armed nav target
F11	Controller XInput sanity check
F12	Diagnose: dump player class + stat components to log
↑ / ↓	Navigate inside the nav menu / target-lock list
← / →	Switch category inside target-lock
Enter	Confirm nav selection
Esc	Close nav menu
Tab	Hold = enter target-lock mode (keyboard mirror of LB)
LB (gamepad)	Hold = enter target-lock mode
D-pad	Navigate nav menu / target-lock list & categories
A / B (gamepad)	Confirm / close nav menu

DualSense / DualShock controllers must be exposed as XInput — enable Steam Input for Palworld (Properties → Controller → "Use Steam Input"). F11 confirms whether XInput sees the controller.

How it works

1. UE4SS injects via dwmapi.dll next to Palworld-Win64-Shipping.exe and loads every C++ mod under Pal\Binaries\Win64\Mods\<ModName>\dlls\main.dll.
2. PalAccessibilityMod::on_unreal_init() loads Tolk.dll, queries the active screen reader, and installs the UE4SS hooks.
3. Hooks::OnPostScriptFunction is the dispatch core. It fires after every blueprint script function call and runs each Handle* dispatcher: button hover, click, dialog text, system notifications, construction info update, construction item focus, construction material row, construction tab select. Each filters by class + function name to avoid firing on noise.
4. Reflection over UProperty lets us read displayed text from any widget without per-class hooks — we walk ForEachPropertyInChain, recurse into FStructProperty for stat values, follow ObjectProperty into nested BP_PalTextBlock_C children, and unwrap FFixedPoint64 by dividing inner int64 by 1000.
5. Hotkeys::Tick() runs every frame and polls keyboard (GetAsyncKeyState) + XInput. All input is gated to Palworld's foreground window.
6. Nav::Tick() runs the audio guidance loop when a target is armed: computes 2D bearing + 3D distance, picks ping interval, computes pan from yaw, picks pitch from vertical offset, plays the WAV via XAudio2 with a per-call output matrix and frequency ratio. Announces direction only when it changes buckets.

Extending it

Almost every menu hook lives in src/Hooks.cpp as a Handle* function. Pattern:

void HandleMyEvent(Unreal::UObject* Context, Unreal::FFrame& Stack) {
    if (ClassNameOf(Context) != L"WBP_TheRightClass") return;
    if (!FunctionNameIs(Stack, L"TheFunction")) return;
    auto txt = ReadFirstFTextParam(Stack);
    if (!txt.empty()) Speech::Get().Announce(std::wstring_view(txt));
}

Then call it from Hooks::OnPostScriptFunction. New widget class names get logged automatically — open UE4SS.log and search for [PalAccess] panel Construct: after entering an unmapped menu.

For new hotkeys, add an entry to the table[] in Hotkeys::Tick with a virtual key code and a lambda. XInput-driven actions go in the same function under the gamepad polling block.

Known gaps / roadmap

• DualSense / DualShock without Steam Input — currently requires Steam Input. A raw HID path is possible but not yet implemented.
• Dynamic foliage trees — only choppable resource-tree spawners show up in nav. Background foliage trees are UMG-instanced, not actor classes, so they're invisible to ForEachUObject.
• Player MaxHP — Palworld computes player-side MaxHP at runtime via a native getter; the SaveParameter field is 0 for player characters. We announce current HP only. Walking via K2_GetActorLocation / ProcessEvent works fine; calling the MaxHP getter is the next step if we want it.
• Combat events — damage taken, low-HP warnings, status effects not yet wired.
• Inventory item-slot content — slot focus reads "Inventory" tab name but not the item the cursor is on.
• Chat / multiplayer messages — not yet announced.
• User-tunable config — verbosity, mute keys, beacon volume, etc.

License

MIT. Tolk is LGPLv3 (its WAV / DLL binaries are not modified; they're carried as runtime dependencies).

Credits

• Tolk (LGPLv3) — Davy Kager
• RE-UE4SS — UE4SS-RE team
• C++ mod scaffold pattern from Dekita/UE4SS-CppModBase
• Speech dedup layer adapted from prior Siralim Ultimate accessibility mod
• Palworld is © Pocketpair, Inc. — this mod modifies no game files and injects in-process at runtime via UE4SS.