His dysgraphia is made more challenging by hypermobile joints in his wrists and hands. For example, when his palm is up he can just about bend his wrist up and over to fold his fingers and palm to rest along the inside of his forearm.
In general his hands are not his friends. He hates zippers, snaps, buttons, utensils and laces.
Yup, got one of those. Can touch fingernails to elbows, it's quite disturbing. It's also dang hard to find velcro shoes in size 7
We're lucky in that he seems to be OK with typing, and by age 12 has developed some pretty decent speed via playing Minecraft and programming (though he definitely isn't using proper form). However, his dyslexic (and probably dysgraphic) sister (9) needs to bypass typing a lot more, and uses a combo of voice recognition and word prediction, which sounds more like what you need.
Like others, I definitely don't recommend waiting. The sooner AT becomes normal and natural for him, his classmates and his teachers, the better. They don't get less self-conscious as they get closer to middle school. It's also nice to have their technology use grow naturally along with their writing demands. In our experience, if it's always available, and easy to access, and the other kids are used to it being used, then it gets used with ever-increasing frequency. For DS, the laptop was occasional go-to-the-side-table-to-type for big projects in grade 3, evolving to carried to every class and used for every written word by the time he started grade 6.
That said, if typing doesn't solve the problem, skip it and move right on to voice recognition and word prediction. The latter is a good interim/ cross-over step, as voice to text takes time and practice, and it can be tough to get good accuracy with children's high-pitched voices. Also, word prediction is useful when the child just needs to write a sentence or two, and/ or it isn't convenient/ comfortable for them to find a place where they can dictate without disturbing/ being disturbed.
