I'm a part-time manual wheelchair user, and one thing we do that really, REALLY helps is to order a supply of "glow necklaces" from a supplier before travel. You can have them shipped to your resort a few days ahead of time (include your reservation # and your date of arrival on the address label/outside of the package somewhere), so that you don't have to worry about carrying them in your luggage. Then, bring them with you on any day that you're expecting to be in any of the parks after dusk.
The problem is that a lot of people in crowds aren't used to looking out for anybody below their usual height (which is silly at WDW, given how many children there are, but that's people for you!) This prompts a lot of the dreaded "dash and stop", where people walk in front of your chair and then stop short, leaving you to either run into them or stop short yourself (often quite painful). The problem is even worse after dark, and especially in Epcot for some reason.
So, as soon as it starts to get dark, I crack five necklaces: four for the wheels (two necklaces snapped together makes it through the spokes of a single wheel), and one for around my neck. The light and the movement of the wheels together catches peoples' eyes and tells them: hey, wheelchair here! It also makes kids take notice, and since small, erratically-moving children are the bane of the wheelchair user anything that increases your noticeability helps tons. Plus, that way I can tell myself that the stares I get are "look at how awesome her wheelchair is" and not "look at the perfectly healthy looking young woman who's faking a disability"! (My wheelchair frame is hot pink, and hot pink frame + glow necklaces *does* look pretty awesome. Kids are fascinated by it.)
It can also be really fun to order way, way more than you need, and then give them out to well-behaved children as "rewards" -- we always ask the parents first if it's OK (to prevent problems), and then tell the kid directly that we wanted to give them a present for being so wonderful. We've had, and created, some real magical moments that way. There's nothing like the look on a kid's face when you give them something for being awesome. (The best was the time we handed out necklaces to a group of six kids all under the age of 10-ish being supervised by a single guy. The kids were being *angels*, but when we told the dad (?) that we wanted to give out necklaces because his kids were being so well behaved, he just laughed and said "Hear that, kids? You managed to fool that nice lady into thinking you were civilized." We laughed about that for a while.)
