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.
Course Word Count
LiveThe number every translation quote needs, which no authoring tool will give you.
PowerPoint Text Extractor
LiveSlide text and speaker notes out of a deck, slide by slide.
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.
Bulk Caption Export
LiveEvery caption out of a Storyline file at once, named by slide.
Text Cleaner
LivePaste from Word or a PDF, get plain text that will not break anything.
Text Diff Checker
LiveSee exactly what your subject matter expert changed in the script.
Invisible Character Finder
LiveShows you the characters you cannot see but your authoring tool can.
Smart Quote Fixer
LiveCurly to straight for code, straight to curly for copy. Both directions.
Text Case Converter
LiveSentence case, title case and the rest, without wrecking SCORM or xAPI.
Character Counter
LiveCharacters, words and how long it takes to say, against the limits that bite.
Colour Contrast Checker
LiveTwo colours, the WCAG ratio, and the nearest colour that passes.
Palette Contrast Matrix
LiveA whole brand palette tested pair by pair, in one grid.
Colour Converter
LiveHex, RGB, HSL and HSV, all at once, with the contrast figures.
Colour Blindness Simulator
LiveHow your palette or your slide looks to someone who cannot see all of it.
Palette Extractor
LivePull the real colours out of a screenshot or a photograph.
Tint and Shade Generator
LiveOne brand colour becomes a full scale you can build a course with.
Audio Duration Totaller
LiveDrop a folder of narration and get every runtime plus the total.
Audio Level Meter
LivePeak and average level for every file, and whether they match each other.
Audio Normalizer
LiveBring a set of narration files to the same level, in one pass.
Audio Silence Trimmer
LiveCut the dead air off the front and back of every clip at once.
Audio Properties Checker
LiveSample rates, channels, and the mono recordings hiding inside stereo files.
Readability Checker
On the benchGrade level, sentence length, passive voice and jargon, tuned for training copy.
Stage Size Calculator
On the benchPick a stage size, see how it lands on real devices.
Before you ship
QA, handoff and accessibility
Image Compressor
LiveShrink course images before they bloat the package.
Image Resizer
LiveBatch resize to the sizes a course actually displays at.
Image Format Converter
LivePNG, JPEG and WebP, any direction, with the size difference shown.
Image Metadata Remover
LiveReads and removes camera data, GPS and comments. Nothing is re-encoded.
Batch Image Inspector
LiveAn inventory of a folder: dimensions, ratios, weight, and what is oversized.
SVG Optimizer
LiveStrip editor bookkeeping out of an icon without touching the artwork.
Course File Inspector
LiveDrop in a .story file or a published package for a full X-ray. It 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.
36 live · more on the bench · new tools ship regularly