The ID Toolbox

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

While you build

The fiddly middle

Narration Timing Converter

Live

Words to runtime and back, at adjustable speaking rates.

Caption Converter

Live

Convert between SRT, VTT and TTML. Shift timings. Fix overlaps.

Caption Timing Shifter

Live

Move every cue by an offset, or anchor the first one to a time.

Caption Reading Speed Checker

Live

Ranks every cue by characters per second and says how long each needs.

Caption Line Splitter

Live

Rewraps cues to a character and line budget, at word boundaries.

Transcript to Captions

Live

Plain text plus a duration becomes a timed caption file.

Bulk Caption Export

Live

Every caption out of a Storyline file at once, named by slide.

Text Cleaner

Live

Paste from Word or a PDF, get plain text that will not break anything.

Text Diff Checker

Live

See exactly what your subject matter expert changed in the script.

Invisible Character Finder

Live

Shows you the characters you cannot see but your authoring tool can.

Smart Quote Fixer

Live

Curly to straight for code, straight to curly for copy. Both directions.

Text Case Converter

Live

Sentence case, title case and the rest, without wrecking SCORM or xAPI.

Character Counter

Live

Characters, words and how long it takes to say, against the limits that bite.

Colour Contrast Checker

Live

Two colours, the WCAG ratio, and the nearest colour that passes.

Palette Contrast Matrix

Live

A whole brand palette tested pair by pair, in one grid.

Colour Converter

Live

Hex, RGB, HSL and HSV, all at once, with the contrast figures.

Colour Blindness Simulator

Live

How your palette or your slide looks to someone who cannot see all of it.

Palette Extractor

Live

Pull the real colours out of a screenshot or a photograph.

Tint and Shade Generator

Live

One brand colour becomes a full scale you can build a course with.

Audio Duration Totaller

Live

Drop a folder of narration and get every runtime plus the total.

Audio Level Meter

Live

Peak and average level for every file, and whether they match each other.

Audio Normalizer

Live

Bring a set of narration files to the same level, in one pass.

Audio Silence Trimmer

Live

Cut the dead air off the front and back of every clip at once.

Audio Properties Checker

Live

Sample rates, channels, and the mono recordings hiding inside stereo files.

Readability Checker

On the bench

Grade level, sentence length, passive voice and jargon, tuned for training copy.

Stage Size Calculator

On the bench

Pick a stage size, see how it lands on real devices.

Before you ship

QA, handoff and accessibility

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.

More about the project →

36 live · more on the bench · new tools ship regularly