ARIA: Treat HTML element as a whole

Question

Is there any way to tell an assistive tool to treat an element (e.g: <div>) as a whole, and not split it in child elements?

First example

Using iOS VoiceOver and a with a field on it, it gets splitted into two different elements:

Second example

This elements are splitted in two parts, where the best solution would be read "122 points" and "First position":

<div class="row">
    <div class="stat lg col-xs-6">
        <span>122</span>
        <i class="icon icon-prize" aria-hidden="true"></i>
        <h5>Points</h5>
    </div>
    <div class="stat lg col-xs-6">
        <span>1º</span>
        <i class="icon icon-prize" aria-hidden="true"></i>
        <h5>Position</h5>
    </div>
</div>

Answer 1

I found that using role="button" the element is treated as a group and its innerText property is read, but announced as a button.

Answer 2

VoiceOver on iOS does indeed sometimes split a sentence, although your example code actually works fine. I used your code as the first line in the screen shots below and then copied the text without the <a> tag as the second line. The second line gets broken up by VoiceOver but the <a> tag does not.

<span class="label info">
   <a href="/round/next">
      Next round starts <strong>in 3 days</strong>
   </a>
</span>
<br>
Next round starts <strong>in 3 days</strong>

(Note: I have the enhanced outline turned on for VoiceOver so the black outline is probably thicker than what you're used to seeing.)