I used to wonder about that because my son loved doing things on the computer and he was not officially diagnosed with dysgraphia until he was 11 and we were told that the dysgraphia was somehow part of the dyspraxia he was also diagnosed with. He first saw a developmental pediatrician and was evaluated by an OT at age 7 but he was not diagnosed with dysgraphia at that time. His spelling was always really good, but his hands tired quickly and the more tired his hands were, the worse his handwriting looked. He would occasionally write letters backwards, but not the same letters and he didn't do it all the time. He never did it when he was being tested.
He always had to write slowly in order to write legibly. He used to misjudge how much room he had left on the page to write words so that he had half a word written at the end and had to erase it and start the word over on the next line. He hated to have to erase. It slowed him down even more.
Writing was not automatic for a long time and he hated practicing writing. He crossed out the word "out" on Handwriting without Tears so that it was Handwriting with Tears but I continued making him practice.
Writing by hand was just not a good way for him to get his thoughts on paper and because I insisted that he do a lot of his writing by hand, he hated writing, and he also hated math when I made him show his work. After he learned to type (on his own, without really using a typing program) I saw there was a huge difference between what he would write by hand and what he would write if he were allowed to type. He used the much higher level vocabulary that he used in his speech. He could get his thoughts down on paper before they disappeared in the depths of frustration. He is very good at writing when allowed to type.
I looked at a three page test he took recently that had a lot of essay questions on it and his writing is legible but he writes bigger when he is in a hurry and he kept running out of room. He didn't have time to go back and make sure he had written capital letters at the beginning of each sentence (this is not a problem when he types) and the teacher counted off for that. It was the reason he made a high B instead of an A on the test, but I didn't care. We never told the teacher he has dysgraphia. We didn't ask for accommodations, but I am the parent volunteer for the class and I take notes for him to allow him more time to complete his in-class writing assignments and she tells everyone to keep writing if they are not finished while she starts the lesson. He always gets the maximum number of points for his in-class writing assignments. He needs the extra time to allow for the slow handwriting.
My son does a lot more math now that I let him do most of it on the computer and I encourage him to use mental math as much as possible. He was always very fast and accurate with mental math, much faster and more accurate than I am.
