Clicking a button while setting focus

This is probably not possible, but worth asking.

I have a task in Storyline 360 where a user can click on 3 buttons. Each button changes a specific BLANK variable in a sentence. Button1 changes variable1 etc etc.

EG. Button1 when clicked changes to "tree", and when clicked again it changes to "mountain".

The sentence would be "There was a beautiful (BLANK) it was very (BLANK)" <-- the second BLANK is for Button2 as an example.

I would love to know if it is possible that when a user clicks one of the buttons, the screen reader reads out the sentence, but we still keep focus on the button.

Right now if the user clicks the button I set focus to the sentence so the user can hear their choice in context, but then they need to navigate back to which ever button they were on before they clicked. If I keep focus on the buttons, the user then has to navigate to the sentence to hear if their choice makes sense.

So yeah...is there a way to allow the user to stay on the button but also have the sentence read out by the screen reader?