You may have gathered from other posts in my blog that I’m a firm believer in equality. I’m a campaigner for web accessibility, and indeed invest some of my spare time in helping to educate people about making websites accessible to people with disabilities — through my work as a grader and infrequent article contributor to Accessites, through offering advice where I can on AccessifyForum, and by looking through relevant legislation such as the Disability Equality Duty and writing articles on it.

I hope you’ll all therefore appreciate that I’m not inherently biased against disabled people.

There is one group, whoever, who I am increasingly coming into contact with — literally — and who make me want to stuff their assistive technology firmly up their backsides. It may be making their life easier, but it’s making walking along the high street bloody dangerous for everyone else.

I’m referring of course to those inconsiderate and potentially lethal drivers. The mobility scooter band.

Firstly, I’d just like to make it plain that I don’t object to the use of mobility buggies or scooters per se, I understand that they are a helpful way to get around an make life a lot more pleasant and comfortable for lots of people. I don’t have a problem with them in general, it’s just that I really, strongly object to them in one specific set of circumstances.

When they are driven by people either incapable or unwilling to drive them properly or with any consideration for other people.

The sort of people who drive the buggers along at about fifteen miles an hour, zooming along the pavement behind you, and then driving them directly over your feet, ankles and anything they can reach if you were foolish enough not to dive out of their way.

The sort of people who when you’re waiting to cross the road with a group of people, creep up behind you and then nudge the mobility scooter repeatedly into your back forcing you to move out of the way so that they can push into the front of the queue.

The sort of people who, when you’re actually crossing the road, will zoom past you and cut in front of you, giving you the choice of whether to stop dead in the middle of the road, step into oncoming traffic, or walk into the side of the scooter.

The sort of people who are happy to beep horns at you to demand that you get out of their way (on the odd time they don’t just try to run you over), but never once think of saying “excuse me”, or “thank you” when you’ve had to dive out of their way.

The sort of people who you can say waving their arms and demanding that other people get out of their way, despite the fact that they’re the ones driving a motorised vehicle at speeds upwards of fifteen miles an hour on pedestrian footpaths, through crowds of previously uninjured pedestrians — many of whom in my town centre are elderly and/or of restricted mobility themselves.

… and because they’re the sort of people who obviously qualify as disabled to get one of these mobility scooter things, and are mostly elderly, it is apparently frowned upon for you to wrestle them out of their vehicles, kick them to the ground and then stamp on their feet, shouting “well how do you bleeding like it, then?”.

Or am I just not getting into the Christmas spirit?