elsarticle affiliation environment does not accept diacritics

Question

As can be seen in the example, the affiliation command throws an error and misrepresents characters with diacritics. Others, such as $, are not printed at all. This was tested with version 3.3.

\documentclass{elsarticle}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
\begin{frontmatter}
    \affiliation{organization={Organization with an ä, "a, à, á, $},
            addressline={Address},
            postcode={12345},
            city={City},
            country={Country}}
\end{frontmatter}
ä "a à á $
\end{document}

This seems like a font issue? Can this be patched away somehow?

Answer 1

Adding\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} (and removing \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} which is unnecessary), I have no problem:

\documentclass{elsarticle}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\begin{document}
\begin{frontmatter}
    \affiliation{organization={Organization with an ä, "a, à, á, $},
            addressline={Address},
            postcode={12345},
            city={City},
            country={Country}}
\end{frontmatter}
ä "a à á $
\end{document}

Answer 2

The class maintainers should be asked to fix this, but this seems to work for now

\documentclass{elsarticle}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
\begin{frontmatter}
    \affiliation{organization={Organization with an \unexpanded{ä, "a, à, á, $}},
            addressline={Address},
            postcode={12345},
            city={City},
            country={Country}}
\end{frontmatter}
ä "a à á $
\end{document}