India HCI 2026 is the 17th Indian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The theme of this year's conference is 

Designing for Dignity: Inclusive, Accessible, and 

Respectful Futures in HCI

Designing for Dignity calls for advancing HCI toward inclusive, accessible, and respectful futures that uphold human agency, equity, and lived experience at the core of technological innovation. The conference will centre on the following sub-themes while remaining open to related and emerging areas of inquiry.

• Designing for Dignity and Respect

• Inclusive and Accessible Interaction

• HCI in the Global South

• Emerging Technologies and AI

• Participatory and Co-Design Practices

• Cross-Cultural Design: HCI Across Geographies, Cultures, and Systems

• Localisation 

• Decolonising HCI and Design Practice

India HCI offers a dedicated platform for research grounded in the South Asian context, including work that engages with local cultures, languages, socio-economic realities, and regional industry practices. The conference’s focused scale and welcoming environment foster meaningful exchange of research insights and implementation experiences.

Author Guidelines

India HCI 2026 seeks submissions that describe original, unpublished research in the field of HCI. Your submission must be original. It cannot be published or be under concurrent review at any other journal or conference. If you make multiple submissions to India HCI 2026 Papers, they must all be distinct from each other. 

The Microsoft CMT service will be used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support. Please submit your paper in the India HCI 2026 CMT submission portal. You may edit the material as often as you wish before the deadline.

India HCI Papers track follows a double blind review process — both authors and reviewers will remain blind to each other. Hence your submissions must be anonymised for review. Submissions that violate the anonymization policy, will be desk rejected. Please remove your names and affiliations from the manuscript. If you are citing your own previous publication, you must refer to it in the third person. For example, please do not say “As we said in our previous work [5]...”. Instead, say something like “As mentioned by Petrie and Chakraborty, 2024 [5]...”. Be careful while using names of institutions, universities, companies or clients that could accidentally reveal your or your organisation’s identity. Similarly, take care while using photographs or place names. A PDF file and other supplemental material (videos, code, data, URLs etc.) sometimes carry the author name in the meta data. Please scrub them off before submitting your file. For more guidance on anonymisation, please read the CHI Anonymization Policy. 

For more details, please read the IndiaHCI ‘26 Author’s Guide for information on anonymisation policy, the paper format (also mentioned below) and conference policies on previous and simultaneous publications. 

The submission portal is now open. You can access it through India HCI 2026 CMT submission portal .

Paper Format & Page Limit:

Format

All submissions need to follow ACM single column format. Papers not in the correct format may be rejected. Here are the templates you may use:

• LaTeX OR Overleaf Please note that the default template is set for 2-column and needs to be manually changed to 1-column for initial review using \documentclass[manuscript,review,anonymous]{acmart}

1. Word - Please note that the Microsoft Word Template contains invisible meta-tags related to the paper format and structure. While writing the paper authors are requested to add their content without altering any format and structure of the template.

Paper Length 

India HCI 2026 does not have a strict page limit. However, authors are encouraged to submit a paper of length proportional to its contribution. The typical length of an India HCI paper is 7,000 to 8,000 words excluding references, figure/table captions, and appendices. If your submission is longer than 12,000 words, please provide a strong justification. Without such a justification, extra long submissions could be desk rejected.

Although AI tools can be safely used for editing author-generated content, their use in content generation is strongly discouraged. In all cases, the work and ideas presented in the paper should be authors’ own. Authors will be responsible for any concerns regarding the accuracy or integrity of their submitted work. While we will not actively employ tools to identify text generated by any of the AI tools, we will investigate submissions brought to our attention.  

Your submission may optionally be accompanied by a video or other supplemental material. Such material can be submitted in the India HCI 2026 CMT submission portal along with your paper (files up to 100 MB are accepted). Authors should note that videos (and other material) too should be anonymous for the review process. Although papers must stand on their own, submitted videos will be available to reviewers as supporting material. Authors should note that no specific guidelines are given for developing a video. Videos are viewed only as supporting material, and authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity to prepare a more polished final video presentation for inclusion in the proceedings and as supplemental material in the ACM Digital Library. Authors are free to update the video once their submission is accepted, if they wish to disclose themselves in the videos.

When submitting your video for review, please encode your video in a format that works across as many platforms as possible without the installation of additional codecs. Please note that the total aggregate size for a submission must not exceed 100 MBytes (including all documents and additional material).

Review Process

Each paper will be subjected to rigorous review by an Associate Chair (from the programme committee) and two external reviewers (experts in the area that are not on the committee). In addition, another Associate Chair will write a meta review. Contact authors will be sent the initial reviews for their papers by August 5, 2026. Authors will have an opportunity to submit a 500-word rebuttal to answer questions or clarify misunderstandings of reviewers by August 15, 2026. The final decision for accepting or rejecting a paper will be made in a PC meeting, after which the authors will be notified of the decisions by August 22, 2026.

All acceptances will be conditional pending changes that the papers committee may suggest or require for the final camera-ready draft of the paper. The primary author of each accepted paper will receive detailed instructions on how to submit a final, publication-ready version of the paper. The paper will not be formally accepted to IndiaHCI until the authors revise it and submit a final draft for approval by the programme committee. Some submissions may be asked to undergo a more intense shepherding process to bring them to the standard required for IndiaHCI. The deadline for submitting the “camera ready” version after all changes will be September 20, 2026. Additionally, at least one author of each paper needs to register for the conference by this date. 

Accepted papers will be published in the IndiaHCI 2026 Conference Proceedings. Before publication, you will need to revise your submissions based on the reviews they receive before submitting their camera-ready manuscripts. Until the camera-readies have been checked off by the programme committee, these must be considered conditionally accepted.

Chairs

• Helen Petrie, University of York

• Dipanjan Chakraborty, BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus

Associate Chairs

• Jose Abdelnour-Nocera, University of West London, UK

• Sandeep Athavale, TCS Research

• Devanuj Balkrishan, JK Lakshmipat University

• Pranjal Borah, IIT Jodhpur

• Anusmita Das, IIT Hyderabad

• Kartikeya Date, IIT Bombay

• Malay Dhamelia, IIT Gandhinagar

• Dilrukshi Gamage, University of Moratuwa

• Siddharth Gulati, University of Manchester

• Anirudha Joshi, IIT Bombay

• Manjiri Joshi, Swansea University

• Yogesh Meena, IIT Gandhinagar

• Wricha Mishra, IIT Bombay

• Khyati Priya, IIT Bombay

• Pallavi Rao, IIT Bombay

• Shubhajit Roy Chowdhury, IIT Mandi

• Sayan Sarcar, Kochi University of Technology, Japan

• Abhishek Shrivastava, IIT Guwahati

• Gavin Sim, University of Lancashire

• Pushpendra Singh, IIIT Delhi

• Ayushi Tandon, Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin

• Saurabh Tiwari, IIT Delhi

• Gautami Tripathi, Jamia Hamdard

At the Conference

Authors of all accepted papers are required to present their work at the main conference. Details about the presentation will be given to the authors of accepted papers. The organisers plan to do the conference in-person without a hybrid option. Remote presentations will be allowed only in case of unavoidable circumstances.

Topics of Relevance:

We invite submissions of research papers spanning various areas of HCI and design, including, but not limited to:

• User Interfaces

• Tangible & Ubiquitous Computing

• Virtual & Augmented Reality

• Multimedia and New Media

• Natural User Interfaces

• Interaction Techniques

• Game Design

• Privacy and Usable Security

• Visualization

• Health, Accessibility, and Aging

• User Modeling

• Engineering Interactive Systems

• ICT for Development

• Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW)

• Solutions that address various societal challenges, focusing on the social impact of HCI interventions in diverse contexts

• User studies that engage qualitative or quantitative research methods and/or offer critical perspectives on technology design, deployment, and/or use.

• Engineering interactive systems design, ubiquitous computing (including wearables), social software, ICT for development (ICTD), and computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW).

• Innovative user interfaces for complex interaction contexts or challenging applications. Examples include managing large, complex information sets, usable privacy and security, multi-user interaction, crowdsourcing, automotive user experiences and in-vehicle interactions (devices and interface automation, instrumentation evaluation, interactive systems, benchmarking driver performance, and behaviour), or techniques that span devices distributed in time and space.

• Breakthrough user experiences leveraging techniques such as machine learning, computer vision, computer graphics, speech processing, networking, or human perception and cognition.

• Innovative software architectures, design tools, toolkits, programming systems, and development environments that support the development and use of the above technologies in user interfaces.

How to Submit

The paper authors will need to have a CMT account before they try to submit their paper.

• Here is a link to create the account: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/docs/help/general/account-creation.html

• Here is a link for authors on how to submit a paper: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IndiaHCI2026/Submission/Index

Any queries regarding the paper submission could be directed to the paper chairs - Helen Petrie (helen.petrie@york.ac.uk) / Dipanjan Chakraborty (dipanjan@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in) 

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.

Publication and Archival

We propose to publish the India HCI 2026 proceedings through the ACM Digital Library. The process for this is underway. Please be aware that there could be article processing charges charged by the publisher to some of the authors (see the ACM web page about this). We will update details about this shortly.