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. Outside school, I volunteer with AImpower.org to co-develop more accessible language and communication technologies with and for people who stutter.

Research Interests

My current research investigates how to design technologies grounded in the diversity of human experiences with a focus on disability. Toward this goal, my work (1) critically examines existing design paradigms against lived disability experiences and knowledge; (2) develops disability-centric deisgn practices with affected communities and domain professionals, such as dataset annotations and model evaluations. I also have a broad interest in socio-technical and political complexities involved in design.

My interest in human diversity origins from my work with people across disabilities, ages, languages, and cultures. I enjoy drawing insights from across disciplines to shape my ideas, particularly from critical scholarship, first-person experiences, and human-centered areas such as linguistics. I have published and co-authored work in top-tier human-centered computing venues such as ACM CHI, CSCW, FAccT, DIS, and IEEE S&P.

Selected Publications

Rethinking Tech Design Through Lived Disability Experience

Cripping AI: Reimagining AI Through Lived Disability Experiences
Xinru Tang, Ting-an Lin, Jingjin Li and Shaomei Wu
To Appear@FAccT2026

Reimagining Sign Language Technologies: Analyzing Translation Work of Chinese Deaf Online Content Creators
Xinru Tang and Anne Marie Piper
To Appear@CHI2026 [preprint]
*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 Design Practices

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

"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
To Appear@CHI2026 [preprint]
*Honorable Mention Award (Top 5%)

Critical Perspectives on Inclusive & Accessible 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*
To Appear@CHI2026 [preprint]

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