The term "static text" is archaic; it goes back to the early days of Windows and, if I remember correctly, the original Macintosh Toolbox. But every modern GUI toolkit I can think of, as far back as Java's AWT in the 90s, refers to this type of object as a label, whether or not it's actually labeling another control. To achieve our goal of making accessibility approachable to today's developers, we should eliminate unfamiliar and archaic terminology wherever we can. So, while this is another inconvenience for our early adopters, I think this name change is worthwhile.
Also, I now believe that the role that we used to call static text, that we now call label, should map to the AT-SPI label role, not the AT-SPI static role. This is based on what I see in both GTK 3 and 4, which use the label role whether or not the text actually has a label relationship with another widget.
The term "static text" is archaic; it goes back to the early days of Windows and, if I remember correctly, the original Macintosh Toolbox. But every modern GUI toolkit I can think of, as far back as Java's AWT in the 90s, refers to this type of object as a label, whether or not it's actually labeling another control. To achieve our goal of making accessibility approachable to today's developers, we should eliminate unfamiliar and archaic terminology wherever we can. So, while this is another inconvenience for our early adopters, I think this name change is worthwhile.
Also, I now believe that the role that we used to call static text, that we now call label, should map to the AT-SPI label role, not the AT-SPI static role. This is based on what I see in both GTK 3 and 4, which use the label role whether or not the text actually has a label relationship with another widget.