This research study presents a novel highly accurate matrix approach for numerical treatments of a strongly nonlinear boundary value problem occurring in the modeling of the corneal shape of the human eye. Using the technique of quasilinearization, the nonlinear model is reduced into a sequence of linearized problems. Then, a spectral collocation procedure based on novel shifted Vieta‐Fibonacci (SVF) is applied to transform each subproblem into a linear algebraic system of equations. An upper bound for the error is provided, and convergence analysis of the SVF series solution in the weighted
L2$$ {L}_2 $$ norm is discussed. The technique of error correction is used to improve the SVF polynomial solutions by means of the residual error function. Various numerical tests are provided to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the presented collocation algorithm. The validation of the proposed approach is shown by comparison with available existing numerical solutions.