Becky,

As Christopher mentioned, Windows Defender comes with Windows 8.1, and 
it's very accessible. Just press the Start key to get to the search box, 
type, "Defend," and when "Defender" appears as an option press enter on 
it. Give it a moment to load. Tab to and press enter on Update, to 
update your virus definitions, and once that's done, tab to and press 
enter on Scan Now to run a quick scan.

About email, I use Thunderbird.

windows 8/8.1 also comes with an email client. Again, press the Start 
button, type, "Mail," and press enter on the "Email App" result. The app 
has had lots of accessibility fixes over time, so you may want to leave 
the app open a bit for it to update. It still has a few quirks, but over 
all, it works well. You need to tab to the list of messages to be able 
to arrow down or up through the list. To read the body of the message, 
you can tab through a bunch of headers or you can press ctrl+o, then 
shift+tab once. You can press Escape to exit an message you opened with 
ctrl+o. When you're on the first or last message in the message list, 
the program says, "Delete," so just arrow down or up once, then back to 
find out who sent it and what the subject is. A nice feature is that the 
email app tells you that you replied to the message on X date. If 
messages have lots of graphics, etc., the screen reader goes silent for 
a moment while the message loads, so it's hard to arrow past it quickly. 
When you're creating a new message or trying to add recipients to a 
reply, the auto complete feature doesn't really work, or at least I 
don't understand how it works. The screen reader announces the name of 
the person, but it doesn't appear in the edit field, and I haven't found 
a way to accept the person's name. It's very usable. I used it for 
reading student email at one of my campuses. When you get used to it, 
it's fairly efficient, but it's not as quick and efficient as, say, 
Thunderbird though it might be if I were using a touch-screen device.

Ciao


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