Xinru Tang

an Asian female with glasses, long hair, and a green T-shirt
CV

Ph.D. Candidate at UCI
Pronoun: She/Her

Contact: xinrut1@uci.edu

Research Interests: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Accessibility, Human-Centered AI

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Publications

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 to co-develop more accessible language and communication technologies with and for people who stutter.

Research Interests

I study how AI can better serve its increasingly diverse user groups, especially disabled populations who are often among those most affected by and early adopters of these technologies. More than treating disability as key to making AI more inclusive, my research treats disability as a core epistemic site to reveal flawed assumptions embedded in AI development about how humans communicate, perceive, think, and work.

Across Sign Language AI, Visual AI, and Speech AI, I work with people across disabilities and domain professionals to understand how disability knowledge can reshape AI from the beginning, from defining problems (e.g., []) and representing data (e.g., []) to designing and evaluating systems (e.g., [], []). Ultimately, the goal is to bring lived human experiences across the pipeline to build AI truly serving humanity.

My work brings these insights together through , a framework for rethinking AI through lived disability experiences.

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. My research has been recognized with two Honorable Mention Awards and two Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) recognitions at ACM CHI and 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

Reimagining Sign Language Technologies: Analyzing Translation Work of Chinese Deaf Online Content Creators
Xinru Tang and Anne Marie Piper
@CHI2026 [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

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 [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
*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
*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

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