FAIRBORN — It takes between 40 and 50 hours to convert one university textbook into an electronic form useful to students with disabilities.

Until recently, only four local universities and colleges had the equipment and personnel to tackle the tedious process for their students: Wright State and Wittenberg universities, the University of Dayton and Sinclair Community College.

On Wednesday, May 21, nine additional universities and colleges joined them in kicking off a collaborative that will not only fund e-text equipment to the nine additional colleges, it will permit them to share their converted textbooks with one another. The consortium, College and University Disability Access Collaborative, is the first such partnership in the state.

Lisa Rhine, Wittenberg's assistant provost, academic achievement, and chair of the Southwestern Ohio Council for Higher Education's disability services committee, spearheaded the project that secured $78,000 to provide conversion equipment for the schools and create a partnership with OhioLink for online access. The participating institutions had to produce matching funds for the program.

Converted textbooks allow students with visual or other disabilities to choose a variety of formats from which to "read" the material, said Jeffrey A. Vernooy, Wright State's director of disability services. Students can use mp3 files, CDs, computer audio files or even a text version that can be read with visual enhancing software. Wright State has converted books this way for at least five years, he said.

And they've done it independently of other schools, which means there was likely some unnecessary duplication.

"But now we can divide the work for a quicker turnaround," said Brenda D. Cooper, UD's assistant director of student learning support services.

Participating schools:

Cedarville University

Central State University

Clark State Community College

Kettering College of Medical Arts

Miami University — Hamilton, Middletown campuses

Sinclair Community College

Southern State Community College

University of Dayton

Urbana University

Wilmington College

Wittenberg University

Wright State University