Word processing is often considered an alternative writing mode or test accommodation for students with specific learning disorders who have handwriting difficulties (HD). Therefore, it is important for researchers and educators to understand the difficulties these students may encounter while using this technology. We examined the frequency of keyboarding difficulties (KD; i.e., slow keyboarding) among higher education students with HD, and the underlying functions (language, fine-motor, and attention) of these disabilities compared to students with only HD. Of the 50 students with HD, 24 percent were found to have KD. This group had significantly lower scores in phonological and orthographic skills, but not in fine-motor and attention functions, compared to students with HD alone. These results support models suggesting that handwriting and keyboarding share linguistic processes. They also suggest that for students with lower linguistic functions, word processing via keyboarding may not be an effective writing mode, and that these students may require tailored accommodation.

Importance: Students with dysgraphia often receive test accommodations to enhance their handwriting legibility or speed. However, these accommodations are seldom individualized to ensure that they actually improve the performance of a specific student. Therefore, a need exists for an evidence-based protocol (henceforth, the Protocol) for selecting individually tailored test accommodations for students with dysgraphia. Objective: To establish the Protocol’s content validity, interrater reliability, and preliminary outcomes through a pilot study. Design: Descriptive and exploratory design. Setting: Research laboratory at a large university in central Israel. Participants: The sample consisted of 25 students (mean age = 24.9 yr, standard deviation = 2.1), of whom 88.0% were male. Inclusion criteria included a previous diagnosis of a specific learning disability and handwriting difficulties. Exclusion criteria were a physical condition or medication intake that may have affected students’ handwriting or typing ability. Results: The Protocol was found to have face validity and high interrater reliability (κ = .80). Its initial use showed that the most suitable accommodations for students with dysgraphia varied and were not always intuitive (e.g., extended time was not always the best accommodation for students with slow handwriting). Conclusions and Relevance: The Protocol appears to be a promising tool to assist occupational therapists in selecting the most appropriate accommodations for students with dysgraphia in a systematic manner. However, additional studies are required to further support these results. What This Article Adds: This study indicates that the selection of the most appropriate accommodation for students with dysgraphia is not always intuitive. It describes a Protocol that enables occupational therapists to select accommodations that are tailored to students’ writing abilities, following a systematic process, while considering the students’ writing performance with and without accommodations.