Actionscript 3 :: Flex - Forcing JAWS To Read FLEX Content "on-demand"

I'm trying to make an existing FLEX application section-508-compliant, by getting it to work smoothly with the JAWS screen reader. It kinda sorta works, but one immediate problem is that when you first go to the login screen, your cursor ends up in the userid field, but JAWS doesn't read anything useful (like the label of the field you're in!) until you hit TAB or something. Is there a way to force it to speak immediately on application startup, without making the user tab/backtab just to hear where they are?

For that matter, as cool as it is that it reads interactive controls as the user tabs around, sometimes you just need to make JAWS say something at a particular point in the logic, which might or might not be associated with a conrol... as if you could write AS code like "jaws.speak('');".