You toggle the answerphone on and off by pressing Alt+Escape. Toggle means that you use the same command to turn on or of. If the answerphone is off when you press this command, a message box appears confirming it is now on, press ENTER or click the OK button to close the box. If the answerphone is on when you press the command, the message box confirms it is now off. By default, the answerphone is off, but you can set WTC to automatically enable it at startup.

You can turn the answerphone on/off in either the directory or communications window, and leave it switched on in either to take calls. It is important that WTC is left active (the foreground application that responds to keyboard and mouse input) when you are not there and want the answerphone to record messages, however, as WTC will not answer a call when it is in the background unless you have explicitly enabled that capability in addition to the answerphone. If messages are received, the communications window will be active on your return, regardless of how you left it.

When messages are left on your answerphone, they appear consecutively in the communications window, as if you had manually answered the calls without clearing the text from the previous one. When you return to your computer and there are answerphone messages waiting, the communications window is active for you to read them. Braille users can start reading straight away if the communications file was empty, apart from the "Ready" prompt, when the answerphone was left on; if you left the display at a certain point in already existing text, it will still be at that point, incoming messages do not change it. Sighted users may have to scroll back to the beginning of the editing window, or press Control+Home, if the whole text is too long to fit in the window.

You can leave the answerphone set with the program displaying the directory. A telephone call during your absence will cause the directory to close and switch to the communications window, so when you get back you will see them immediately. If you try to clear the communications window, such as by pressing Alt_+ENTER to return to the directory, WTC warns you that there are messages and asks if you want to save them to the capture file. This also happens when you shut the program down, it is intended to help prevent you accidentally discarding unread messages. If you have read them and are clearing the communications file purposely to remove them, answer "n" or click the No button. If you would like to save the messages, answer "y" or click the Yes button to create the capture file, or append to it if it already exists. You can subsequently read messages saved to the capture file by pressing Control)+ENTER in Communications Mode.

When the answerphone is enabled, WTC answers an incoming call as soon as it is detected without Escape having to be pressed, but apart from that the one and only difference it makes to taking a telephone call is that it sends the answerphone message to the caller when the connection has been established. There is no difference in the operation of the 'phonecall. If you are actually there, you can read the incoming text and type back to the caller as if you had answered yourself in the first place. You can in fact stop the message being sent for any call that you want to conduct yourself, as described in the next section.

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Using the Answerphone