It's definitely not the easiest thing, but I imagine that someone working with Chinese characters often would have learned enough about radicals and stroke order to do it in a pinch. The hardest part is memorizing the characters; the OCR in, say, Google Translate, is quite good at picking out what you meant.
...OCR, as I said. But handwriting skills and radical knowledge are nice to have in case those services go down or you're dealing with bad handwriting.
