OP my autistic children of a similar age won’t even wear ear defenders at school now because they are so worried about being different. They will sometimes use loops because they are more discreet. Absolutely no way should you put a vest on your child announcing his private medical information to anybody who sees him, you may make him more of a target for abuse.
Nasty, selfish people will continue to be so regardless of being aware of SEN, in fact some may even ramp it up more because like all bullies they only target people they perceive to be more vulnerable. I expect they’d have reacted in the same way to anybody with a different medical condition causing them a few moments of inconvenience by blocking the pathway: an elderly person who’d become faint and collapsed or someone who had slipped and broken a leg etc. These types of people are just supremely entitled and think the world should revolve around them, their preferences taking precedence over others’ needs.
As with all bullies the answer is to stand up to them. One of you should have stood between DS and potential oncoming traffic as an easily visible barrier while the other tried to calm him enough to move off the pathway.
Anybody riding their bike at a safe speed with sufficient visibility in front of them to stop in case of an obstruction would have been able to stop in time and has no reason to complain. If this was difficult they were not riding safely and are entirely to blame because they created any potential “danger” through their own reckless behaviour. I suspect they were not remotely concerned about potential danger, rather just furious that somebody had held them up for a few moments. A lot of them are obsessed with timing themselves and think their personal bests are more important than safety or the other people using public spaces.
Public spaces and pathways are for all of the public to use. This wasn’t a dedicated cycling lane so the false analogy some posters have attempted to make to being in the middle of a road are absurd.
Given that this was the reaction of these cyclists to seeing a small child in clear distress you wouldn’t have changed their behaviour and suddenly elicited empathy from them by giving them more information, I’m afraid. Better to laugh at their ridiculous behaviour, tell them firmly they’ll have to wait then ignore them entirely but stand firmly in their way until the other adult has been able to move DS out of harm’s way.
This is another reason that cyclists should have to have number plates so that antisocial behaviour, dangerous riding (and breaches of the highway code when on roads) can be more easily reported given these entitled behaviours are so prevalent from them in all of these different contexts. They seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that cyclists have priority on public footpaths, towpaths, roads and pavements and that all of these should be treated as dedicated cycling lanes. 🤨