Xinru Tang

About

I am a Ph.D. candidate at Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. I am advised by Dr. Anne Marie Piper as a member of Accessibility Research Collective. In addition to my major work on accessibility and assistive tech, I spent wonderful time at Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), working on inclusive security and privacy. Outside school, I volunteer with AImpower.org to co-develop more accessible language and communication technologies with and for people who stutter.

Research Interests

I bridge HCI, accessibility, and responsible AI to study, design, and build AI systems that prioritize human needs, values, and safety.

My current focus is to develop “Cripping AI”, a research agenda that positions disability as a critical source of knowledge to interrogate the restrictive assumptions underlying AI development and develop AI systems that support different human bodies and minds.

Across Sign Language AI, Visual AI, and Speech AI, I work with disabled communities, showing how disability knowledge can help advance human-centered AI across the entire development pipeline, including:

• Problem Formulation, e.g., through analyzing deaf communities' translation work, I reframe machine translation from a task of language conversion to a languaging activity to better account for fluidity in human language use [1].
• Data Representation, e.g., my disability-led annotation work shows that speakers' lived experiences is a key form of expertise to speech dataset creation [2].
• Design & Evaluation, e.g., my work on visual AI for blind people shows subjectivity inherent in visual descriptions and limitations in design and evaluation frameworks that privilege sighted perspectives [3, 4].
• Deployment & Impact, e.g., my ongoing work examines impacts AI brings to high-stakes contexts such as employment.

My work has appeared in top-tier venues in human-centered computing and Responsible AI including ACM CHI, CSCW, FAccT, DIS, and IEEE S&P. I have received recognitions including two Honorable Mention Awards from CHI and two Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) recognitions from CSCW.

Selected Publications

Rethinking AI Development Through Lived Disability Experience

Cripping AI: Reimagining AI Through Lived Disability Experiences
Xinru Tang, Ting-an Lin, Jingjin Li and Shaomei Wu
@FAccT2026 [PDF] [ACM] [slides]

Reimagining Sign Language Technologies: Analyzing Translation Work of Chinese Deaf Online Content Creators
Xinru Tang and Anne Marie Piper
@CHI2026 [PDF] [ACM] [slides]
*Honorable Mention Award (Top 5%)

Everyday Uncertainty: How Blind People Use GenAI Tools for Information Access
Xinru Tang, Ali Abdolrahmani, Darren Gergle and Anne Marie Piper
@CHI2025 [PDF] [ACM] [slides]

Developing Disability-Centered AI Practices

Disability-First AI Dataset Annotation: Co-designing Stuttered Speech Annotation Guidelines with People Who Stutter
Xinru Tang, Jingjin Li and Shaomei Wu
@CHI2026 [PDF] [ACM] [slides]

"It's trained by non-disabled people": Evaluating How Image Quality Affects Product Captioning with VLMs
Kapil Garg, Xinru Tang, Jimin Heo, Dwayne R Morgan, Darren Gergle, Erik B Sudderth and Anne Marie Piper
@CHI2026 [PDF] [ACM]
*Honorable Mention Award (Top 5%)

Critical Perspectives on Accessibility & Inclusive Design

Beyond "Vulnerable Populations'': A Unified Understanding of Vulnerability From A Socio-Ecological Perspective
Xinru Tang, Gabriel Lima, Li Jiang, Lucy Simko and Yixin Zou
@CSCW2025 [PDF] [ACM] [slides] [blog]
*Recognition for Contribution to Diversity and Inclusion

Access in the Shadow of Ableism: An Autoethnography of a Blind Student's Higher Education Experience in China
Weijun Zhang* and Xinru Tang*
@CHI2026 [PDF] [ACM]

Designing for Collective Access: In Search of a Solution to Accessible Communication in a Mixed-Ability Non-Profit
Xinru Tang and Anne Marie Piper
@DIS2026 [PDF] [ACM]