thinkpad t23 and serial port

[Cheryl Homiak <chomiak@chartermi.net>]

I just bought a thinkpad t23. I am using braille and speech screenreading
programs for which the hardware requires a serial port. I have been unable to
get them to work and the dmesg that I have been able to access by running the
rescue and root floppies for woody, going to the other console and directing the
output of dmesg to a file on a floppy and then reading the file using my
desktop, which does have speech and braille working,
shows no serial port although of course i do have one. It is my understanding
that probably the serial port is turned off on this machine. I can not access
the bios without sighted help because there is no way for me to read it. I
also cannot access the hard drive even with a dos boot floppy, probably
because the file system is ntfs or fat-32 and not supported by dos-6.2, which
is what I have. somebody sent me the following files from an older thinkpad
T20:
ps2.exe ps2main.exe ps2.msg ps2.ver
which I copied onto a bootable dos floppy with the following batch file:

@echo off
ps2 serial on
ps2 sera enable
which on the T20 apparently turned on the serial port without the need to get
into the bios. I then rebooted into dos again and tested, also tried running the
speech and braille modified woody install floppies again; still no speech and no
serial port.
Is there any way to make this work? Do I need different or additional files or
different or additional commands or must I wait until i can get a sighted person
to get into the bios for me?

Thanks.

Cheryl