The ID
Toolbox
Free tools for the boring half of instructional design.
Small, single-purpose utilities that do one thing and get out of the way. No account and no email. Your files never upload: the tools that read them run entirely in your browser.
Before you build
Decisions, scoping and estimates
Authoring Tool Selector
LiveRise or Storyline? Sixteen weighted criteria, a recommendation, and the reasoning.
Does This Need To Be A Course?
LiveEight questions. Sometimes the honest answer is a job aid, or nothing at all.
Development Time & Cost Estimator
LiveComplexity and finished minutes in, development hours and a cost range out.
Seat Time Estimator
On the benchHow long a learner will actually spend, from your word count and interactions.
Learning Objective Checker
On the benchTests an objective against the ABCD model and flags the vague verbs.
Bloom's Level Picker
On the benchPaste an objective, get its level and better verbs.
While you build
The fiddly middle
Narration Timing Converter
LiveWords to runtime and back, at adjustable speaking rates.
Caption Converter
LiveConvert between SRT, VTT and TTML. Shift timings. Fix overlaps.
Caption Timing Shifter
LiveMove every cue by an offset, or anchor the first one to a time.
Caption Reading Speed Checker
LiveRanks every cue by characters per second and says how long each needs.
Caption Line Splitter
LiveRewraps cues to a character and line budget, at word boundaries.
Transcript to Captions
LivePlain text plus a duration becomes a timed caption file.
Readability Checker
On the benchGrade level, sentence length, passive voice and jargon, tuned for training copy.
Contrast Matrix
On the benchPaste a full palette, test every text-on-background pair at once.
Stage Size Calculator
On the benchPick a stage size, see how it lands on real devices.
Before you ship
QA, handoff and accessibility
Course File Inspector
On the benchDrop in a source file for a full X-ray. Your file never uploads.
SCORM Package Inspector
On the benchReads a published package: version, launch file, mastery score, missing files.
Alt-Text Checker
On the benchFlags filenames used as descriptions, empty strings and text that runs long.
Why these exist
I’ve been designing corporate training for twenty-eight years. Since 2008 I’ve led NextGen AI Learning, now a community of nearly 90,000 people working in this field.
In all that time the same small problems have never been solved. Counting narration words for a translation quote. Hunting for the asset that pushed a course past the LMS limit. Auditing caption coverage across fifty slides, by hand, again.
So I’m building them properly and giving them away. After twenty-eight years in this field, this is the part I want to give back.
9 live · more on the bench · new tools ship regularly